Azaleos released a white paper on the state of the market for SharePoint in 2011. The white paper was commissioned research put together by Osterman Research:

“In this update and extension to an earlier survey Osterman Research conducted an in-depth survey of SharePoint-enabled organizations. The project examines the state of the SharePoint market — adoption and management trends, and explores key corporate challenges such as, costs and other issues surrounding the use of SharePoint. The results uncovered key findings related to upgrade momentum, the mission critical nature of SharePoint, SharePoint in the cloud, and uptime challenges.“

You need to register to read the white paper. I did, and here are a couple of things that stood out:

1. SharePoint is expected to become a more mission-critical platform over the next 3 years. There is a definition about what this means.

2. Only organizations using SharePoint could respond to the Osterman Research survey. Of those, 87% were using both Exchange and SharePoint. All respondents with Exchange were also using SharePoint. For the 13% without Exchange Server as well, 64% used SharePoint and no other collaboration or ECM platform. Fascinating.

3. Survey respondents indicated that some movement to a cloud-based model is planned over the next 3 years.

4. There are three inhibitors to SharePoint adoption: insufficient end user training and user familiarity with SharePoint (I’d say that this is part of the challenge, and it’s a user adoption challenge more broadly), lack of SharePoint administration skills, training, and knowledge, and lack of budget.

It’s worth a read.