Service Provision in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: How SaaS Is Changing the Global Digital Economy

The current digital needs of economies are accelerating the dynamics of the global cloud market. The spree is propelled by the fact that cloud computing works great towards optimizing infrastructure costs and rapid scaling up, especially when it comes to large projects. According to analysts, the global cloud market is growing extremely fast, gaining up to 25% per year, while the main drivers of the rise are SaaS and IaaS. Gartner forecasts that the market will exceed the overall IT services segment trice and reach $331 billion by 2022. According to another analytical agency, IDC, global spending on public cloud services will double up to $500 billion by 2023. And IBM says that 85% of the world’s companies have already been using more than one cloud service in their business processes, and 96% of organizations are expected to employ multiple cloud solutions in a couple of years.

That said, the global cloud market is dominated by SaaS (software as a service), with its share exceeding 60%, according to IDC. Over the next five years, SaaS will grab more than half of all the cloud investments. Based on Veeam’s Cloud Data Management Report, 77% of organizations use SaaS to improve security and flexibility, and this figure is forecasted to skyrocket to 93% shortly. Office applications, Virtual PBX, co-working and communications, CRM, and accounting are among customer priorities in this segment.

Why SaaS Trumps Alternative Models

Customers choose the model thanks to its mix of simplicity and efficiency. They don’t need to install and learn complex software, and hardware failures and operational errors, if any, do not result in meaningful data loss. SaaS companies provide uptime levels surpassing those commonly delivered by IT departments and, more so, regular employees who are not pros in the field. In addition, SaaS seems to be less expensive than using software under other models. This is especially important for customers who are not sure which solution to select in the long run or those who need certain tools for a short time. Eventually, the advantages of SaaS boil down to:

  •  faster deployment
  •  low entry threshold
  •  scalability
  •  provider-side system maintaining and updating
  •  accessibility from different devices
  •  support for geo-distributed workforce
  •  low PC requirements
  •  cross-platform support

As a result, businesses gain the efficiency and speed they need to succeed in the digital economy while data collected and stored with cloud technologies contribute to proper decision-making and productivity-boosting automation.

Now, let’s see into how SaaS works for businesses in various fields through the example of four medium-size providers.

NexaProfessional

They can leave their clientele unattended to, they can use automated answering systems, or they can use large third world outsourcing agencies. The first is plain shoddy, automated answering machines either create inefficiencies or impact customer experience, and third world outsourcing agencies are risky for your brand and only viable for larger corporate operations. The new age of the internet has given us a fourth alternative. Through packaging their services online, a new breed of outsourcing agencies are now able to accommodate smaller operations, ensure brand protection, and cater to businesses with specialist requirements like those within healthcare or law.

Our first case study looks at NexaProfessional, who quintessentially embody this modern model. When they say outsourcing, they mean outsourcing. Their virtual receptionists are highly trained and will respond to your clients’ calls accurately 24/7/365 without the added physical presence in your office space. This specialist approach goes beyond outsourcing your call answering: Nexa offer bilingual agents, lead qualification experts, and  deliver seamless integration with all the software your business already has in use – from calendars to CRMs. Nexa and other new-age call outsourcing services even comply with industry-specific requirements. This model is agile, cost effective, and provides guaranteed quality. Comparative manual operations in this space, are either dead or dying.

Zenscrape

Have you ever tried to explore competitors’ prices by surfing the Web manually? Tiresome job, isn’t it? For our second case study, we asked Zenscrape’s Head of Content, Christoph Leitner, what he felt SaaS had down for the evolution of their industry (data extraction) and his feedback was as follows:

“Scraping HTML and competitor data were once processes with all kinds of barriers and access issues for the everyday consumer. If you were a large company who were lucky enough to afford an expensive data extraction software license, the tools were somewhere between an automated, but frictional system and a poorly compiled Mechanical Turk. SaaS makes tools commercially available everyone. Whether you are the CEO of Google, or a micro-businessman dropshipping a couple dozen goods between Alibaba and your local economy, SaaS are available to you. And in most cases your usage is tied very closely to what you end up paying, for example systems that use credits. Zenscrape is no different, we provide lightning-fast data extraction and our API is commercially available to all. We are even transparent enough to show you how to build your own extraction tool with languages like JavaScript.”

Leitner was humble in his assessment of their services – Zenscrape provides its users with a web-scraping API, rotating residential proxies, and associated data aggregating services. Whether you need to collect information on current trends in your industry, spot highly targeted leads, perform brand/reviews monitoring, or get any other structured data from multiple web-resources, the provider is here to ethically extract HTML from thousands of sites simultaneously. The technology behind the service allows for CAPTCHA solving, IP rotation, and JS rendering to successfully overcome common obstacles This is coupled with an abundance of setting and filtering options to capture the most accurate results. Geo-targeting, support for multiple programming languages, and high concurrency are all attached.

Code Capsules 

Sometimes, app developers need a helping hand just like their less tech-savvy users often do. Developers need a platform that assists them with building, deploying, launching, managing, and scaling their projects. And it would be nice to have someone who would provide them with the whole infrastructure and various helpful tools so that the developers could save effort, time, and money. This is why instant deployment services like Digital Ocean or Code Capsules are the future of web development. Software isn’t built line-by-line anymore, you shop around libraries, use pre-existing frameworks, or just build and deploy with Code Capsules.

Code Capsules bridges GitHub repositories and a server (capsule) for hosting apps. Projects can be frontend and backend, simple and challenging, supporting Angular, React, Vue, Node.js, Java, and Python, to name a few. Apart from access to the computation opportunities, Code Capsules delivers organizational tools for collaborative development, free SSL certificates, and personalized domain names. It must be an absolute pleasure to have a website domain purchased, hosted, built, and launched within a couple of hours.

TrackTime24

The pandemic has moved a great deal of the workforce offline, enhancing the problem of efficient remote staff management.

For this case study, we contacted TrackTime24 and asked for some feedback on the company, SaaS, and productivity tools. One of their Outreach Specialists responded:

“…from a productivity tool standpoint, employers around the world are starting to realize that remote work is a viable option for their enterprises. Bureaucracy breeds a ‘meeting culture’ into corporate. Teams start to find any excuse to schedule a meeting in an expensive meeting room with nice coffees. Employers are now also realizing that if deliverables can be reliably tracked, there is no need to constantly supervise or ‘police’ employees. SaaS productivity tools have been built in response to these observations. For example, TrackTime24 enables remote work and empowers employers and HR managers, equipping them with a convenient set of tools to schedule working hours, track leave, monitor business trips, monitor working activity, track overtime, and more. Based on a survey conducted among our 80K+ customers, our time tracking software saves at least 5 hours of work a week on timesheets alone.”

We took a further look at TrackTime. Aside from eliminating manual scheduling, the app allows even better cost-cutting and time-saving with automated payroll processes, reduced paperwork, boosted productivity, and shared communication channels. Ultimately, you get enhanced workforce management and a transparent working environment accessible from multiple devices.

Conclusion

Although the above-listed providers drastically differ in the type of services rendered, they all have been successfully replacing traditional approaches in their respective niches. Like many other SaaS companies, they deliver on-demand innovations paired with diverse pricing plans to meet the needs and budgets of both small businesses and global corporations. This flexibility is just the thing for the economic downturn we are going through.