The lift to the national economy is estimated at $224 billion over 10 years, with the federal and state governments being able to save $62bn over a decade.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is internet-based software, which is often purchased using a subscriber-based model.

"[It] is much more like what consumers would use today, such as Uber or Facebook, where you simply just go on to your device ... and you type in an address," said TechnologyOne CEO Ed Chung, whose company commissioned the report by IBRS and Inside Economics.

"They would do the same accounting functions or HR payroll functions that they would have done on-premises that they downloaded on their servers, but they simply would just log on from any device."

Examples include Adobe, storage service Dropbox, workplace communication service Slack, project management product Trello or human resources service Employment Hero.

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Mr Chung said he was told by clients they were saving around 30 per cent by changing their software.

"That [money saved] can be reinvested into critical infrastructure, hospital services, community services in local government, or more professors, or more higher education for our country," he said.

According to the report, the ACT would have the biggest economic boost of any states or territories, which Mr Chung said was largely due to the use of old hardware.

"That probably highlights that there's still a lot of on-premises software applications being used," he said.

The lift to the national economy was estimated at $224 billion over ten years.

Mr Chung said the national $224 billion boost was "mind boggling."

"To put it in context, there's a lot of economic modeling around things like [South Australian mine] Olympic dam, or LNG gas modeling.

"[But] moving to software as a service, $224 billion is six times the amount of economic impact that Olympic dam has. So it's just enormous, it blows my socks."

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