Heading into 2022, organizations should keep a close eye on the latest trends in the SaaS industry.
One of the fastest growing industries in the enterprise environment, SaaS has become the preferred choice of model among organizations. As per Reporterlink’s Cloud Computing Market by Service 2021 report, the SaaS market at present is growing 18% each year. The same report also found that 70% of all CIOs agree that agility and scalability are the key motivators for using SaaS applications. Additionally, SaaS solutions enabled organizations to access data providing a flexibility and convenience required for today’s hybrid workforce.
As per Manish Sood, Founder & CTO, Reltio, “ The requirements for revolutionary SaaS tools will increase as organizations grow their remote presence.” He further added, “In order to keep up in this fast-paced, COVID-impacted world, organizations will need to expand their digital tech portfolio to work towards preserving efficiency and flexibility in the workforce. It is our responsibility as business partners to embrace the distributed remote work model as the present and the future of the way people work. In order to do so, companies must heighten their investment in SaaS, Cloud and Data as the fundamental tenets of technology investments to run their business.”
As the enterprise SaaS market is not showing any signs of slowing down, organizations can expect higher adoption rates and more solutions that will be introduced. Here are four trends that they should keep an eye on while heading in 2022:
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Consolidation in the SaaS industry will continue and a composable
Rich Waldron, Co-Founder & CEO, low-code workflow automation organization, Tray.io stated, the acquisition frenzy is not over. He believes tech giants will continue acquiring smaller companies to gain a significant part of the market share, exponentially expanding their solutions and offerings to keep a competitive advantage. “The Slack acquisition is a perfect example,” said Rich Waldron, “Salesforce is positioning this as a way to distribute Salesforce technology across a whole organization in a more-seamless manner.”
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AI will be a critical enabler of personalization, efficiency, and best-in-class experiences
Annie Pearl, Chief Product Officer, Calendly believes analytics, optimizing the customer experience, and sourcing new revenue channels will drive the future of work forward as organizations begin to see vastly expanded use cases for AI across consumer-centric industries like retail and banking. “At a macro level, machine learning and predictive analytics will detect patterns and trends that will power solfutions for the labor shortage and supply chain challenges” said Annie Pearl. She added, “Knowledge workers will demand AI-powered SaaS tools to improve productivity and streamline customer service with natural language processing to power chatbots and intelligent agents.”
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Growing enterprise budgets and the rise of product-led growth (PLG) companies will force greater collaboration between IT, end users, and product leaders
Given their influence among the board of directors, CIOs are witnessing a significant increase in their budgets. Meaning, the enterprise buying pattern will evolve to a bottom-up approach accounting for PLG organization technologies that are gaining traction among the end-users and the pivot to remote work. Annie Pearl believes that a great emphasis on the employee experience will entail handing over some authority when it comes to users choosing productivity tools that suit them. “Product leaders at PLG companies will bear some responsibility of developing SaaS products with security and control requirements baked in out the gate or will find themselves unsuccessful. IT, end-users, and product leaders will sit at the same table,” added Annie Pearl.
The enterprise SaaS market will see transformational changes in the coming year. Organizations seeking to increase their enterprise SaaS applications adoption, while the required custom solution is not available, working with their provider is a path worth exploring.