In the SaaS world, there is often a debate between “best in breed” point solutions and all-in-one or full-stack solutions. Which path do you think wins out over the next 5-10 years and why?
Right now, the answer seems to be “both”.
Best-of-breed solutions seem to have been the big winners in the current generation of SaaS — Zoom, Slack, etc. — at least on the surface.
But if you squint, you’ll see a lot of growth in suites and solutions with multiple products:
- Salesforce now has 4 huge $1b+ clouds
- Intercom has multiple core products
- Twilio has several core products now and bought SendGrid for $3b to continue to provide a larger suite of tools to developers
- Workday has finally expanded into 3+ core areas
- etc. etc.
Enterprises in 2019 and 2020 want to buy more from the vendors they trust. This is the least risk and highest overall ROI in moving more to the Cloud.
They also still want to bring innovation into the enterprise. This requires hunting out best-of-breed vendors as well.
So we’re in a phase where the strongest SaaS players are all launching multiple products with strong market positions, at least as they cross $500m-$1b+ in ARR.
I think we are thus seeing the Ruise of the SaaS Suite.
But also, The Best of Times for Innovation Vendors.
A bit more here: You Probably Need A Second Product to Really Go Big. At Least By $1b In ARR. | SaaStr
Expect the leading cloud vendors to have broader horizontal offerings than in the past. And expect buyers to still look for 10x better solutions that often only a point vendor provides.
