Q: What impact will the effects of covid have on the SaaS industry?
Many of us in SaaS are really struggling now. Restaurants, events, recruiting, and so many other industries are in deep trouble.
But on balance, Covid-19 is dramatically accelerating SaaS:
During “Shelter Plus” times, in the end, we’ve worked more in the Cloud:
- More Zooms. You know this, but also
- More Apps. Application building is up 50%. See Twilio, etc.
- More Collaboration. Slack, Atlassian, Smartsheet, etc.
- More Selling on the Web / eCommerce. Shopify, Wix, etc.
- More Digital Selling. DocuSign, Adobe Sign, etc.
- More “Digital Transformation”. Coupa, Box, etc. all with a boost.
- More Web Infrastructure to Keep Up. Fastly, Datadog, Okta, Crowdstrike, etc.
Yes, IRL Cloud companies have taken a hit — e.g., Eventbrite.
But far more have been “Covid Beneficiaries”. Zoom aside, this was hard to predict in March. It’s now clear.
We are now all living and working in the Cloud.
Will this “boost” end once we can all go back to our prior lives? Maybe. But that is looking like it will take quite a while. And perhaps even more importantly, Covid-19 has pushed forward projects, in many cases by years. Once an organization has accelerated its Digital Transformation projects, 100s more projects follow. Those will be accelerated as well.
And the projects that come after you move to Salesforce, to Shopify, to Coupa etc. … well, those projects need 100+ other SaaS vendors to complete, improve, enhance and deploy.
