Just earlier today I wrote about the SaaS hype curve hitting its peak.  In a report from InformationWeek, 52% of 1,300 developers said they expect to work on SaaS projects in 2009, with most developers working on SaaS implementations in North America.

Also of interest: cloud computing is expected to be less frequently used, with only 10% of developers using cloud services (although many of the SaaS vendors may ultimately leverage cloud computing vendors on the back-end to provide scalability, so who knows).  Development of RIA, or rich internet applications, was also expected by 68% of the respondents.

I still think this isn’t too surprising: cloud computing as a concept is useful for folks that want to take the halfway step.  It’s great if you don’t want to own datacenter maintenance, or if you want to deploy a piece of enterprise software on a scalable infrastructure, but there are more upfront benefits in jumping into a SaaS solution right away rather than taking the cloud computing interim step.

Also, with so many varied definitions of RIA, and so many easy-to-use frameworks (Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex, Sun JavaFX), it’s not surprising to see such a high percentage of respondents say they’ll be working on an RIA project.

[c/o InformationWeek]

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Enterprise Web, SaaS