Before the era of SaaS (software as a service), CIOs and other business leaders had a detailed view of the application fleet deployed within the enterprise, maintained close relationships with vendors, managed software purchases, upgrades and upgrades, and personally monitored the health of the IT infrastructure. The situation changed dramatically when the corporate world was introduced to Salesforce 20 years ago. Customers liked the software as a service, so after this company, other vendors poured into this market, new pricing models appeared (the subscription model gained particular popularity among them), and continuous provision of services.
5 SaaS Management Trends
Below are five trends that are emerging in the field of SaaS application management.
1. Enterprise Application Sprawl is Rampant
SaaS applications development and their number are simply amazing. On average, there are 129 applications per company, and this is assuming that it only counts applications that the user accesses through single sign-on technology, in which the user navigates from one section of the portal to another without re-authenticating. Meanwhile, cloud security solution provider Netskope comes up with even more impressive data.
Over the past few years, the number of applications that businesses need to run their operations has exploded. Uncontrolled growth in the number of applications is fraught with financial losses, security problems, and disruption of operational processes.
2. Application Management is Largely Manual
CIOs do their best to catalog and manage the application fleet, but most of them do it wrong or inefficiently.
However, it can take months or even years to create spreadsheets that include a huge number of applications and employees, especially if everything happens in a dynamic mode: today some users use one application, tomorrow another, in addition to this, you need to display contract data, information from input management systems and from other sources, which is almost impossible to do in real-time. Collecting, coordinating, and analyzing data with the subsequent input of this information takes precious working time from employees, distracting them from strategic priorities.
3. Cost Management and SaaS Performance Tracking are Top Priorities
Businesses spend a lot of money on SaaS. Fortune 500 companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on subscription software. 97% of IT leaders list cost control and SaaS performance tracking as top business priorities.
4. CIOs Optimize Costs by Analyzing How User Data Interacts with Applications
Analyzing the data that interacts with applications gives CIOs a complete picture of how purchased SaaS software licenses meet user needs, optimizing costs by revoking or relicensing mid-contract. Armed with data, they can be confident that they have purchased the right type of license for each user, giving them the functionality they actually use.
However, only 19% of IT professionals are engaged in SaaS software using a technology platform. However, many CIOs have already started looking for suitable automated tools. By 2023, SaaS revenue is projected to reach $195 billion.
5. Popular SaaS Apps Provide Big Savings Opportunities
The largest SaaS providers offer solutions that provide significant cost savings. Respondents named Microsoft Office 365 (72%) as the most popular targeted investment tool, followed by Salesforce (51%) and ServiceNow (48%). At least 10% of respondents split their votes between Workday, Dropbox, GSuite, Box, DocuSign, Slack, Zoom, and other popular SaaS applications, citing the ability to bring multi-level license management in line with actual usage levels as their reason for choosing.
Conclusion
In recent years, the SaaS market has experienced a fundamental shift: instead of opting for monolithic software packages, enterprises have begun to prioritize best-in-class single applications. Employees only benefited from a constant stream of updates with new features, forgetting about such a phenomenon as the versioning of software products. Significantly, marketing strategies and successful sales of SaaS vendors, along with software purchases by businesses outside of traditional software sales channels, have led to a massive decentralization of application management. Today, the average organization operates an unimaginably large number of applications, so managing them is not a trivial task for CIOs, who are responsible for investing in SaaS applications and their ROI.
