While the global market for software-as-a-service continued to grow in 2009, recent research expects the service to thrive in IT markets during the next four years.

A recent study by IDC cited last year’s $13.1 billion in worldwide SaaS revenues when it made its predictions for the service to see a compound annual growth rate of 25.3 percent, reaching $40.5 billion by 2014. The research shows the IT trends are currently favoring SaaS adoption.

"The SaaS model has become mainstream, and is quickly coming to dominate the planning – from R&D, to sales quotas, to partnering, channels and distribution – of all software and services vendors," said Robert Mahowald, vice president of SaaS and cloud services research at IDC. "Enterprise IT plans are rapidly shifting to accommodate the growing choices for sourcing most or all IT software functions."

The IT industry will shift its trends regarding the use of SaaS to favor application development, which is expected to account for more than half of the market’s revenue by 2014.

Other recent studies on SaaS has found emerging application development trends in the IT industry. A survey released last week by Iron Mountain revealed 59 percent of SaaS subscribers currently use as many as five of their service’s applications, while 65 percent plan on adding new SaaS aplications during the next 12 to 18 months.