Latest SaaS Trends in 2019

by Nerijus Tilvikas | Mar 21, 2019 | SaaS | 103 comments

322 Shares

Software-as-a-service is a type of software that offers a lot of agility and cost-effectiveness for every company. However, this industry is changing incredibly fast, so there’s always some new trends forming the market. Trends are usually becoming trends when everybody from that specific market starts using that kind of feature. It always suggests new ways to work more efficiently, reduce cost, and increase customer satisfaction. Artificial Intelligence, Platform as a Service, Mobile SaaS, and Vertical SaaS are the latest trends in the SaaS industry. Read more about all of them and find out how they can benefit your business.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning became one of the need-to-have features, without which SaaS companies could hardly imagine their everyday work. Automation, personalization, security are places where AI is being implemented.

AI allows more functions to be automated. Chatbots now is the best example of how automation can reduce costs and facilitate customer service. There is no need to hire an additional employee to help clients with some basic questions and work 24/7. It comes without saying that this remoteness ensures bigger customers satisfaction. Chatbots also ensures every customer gets the same good customer service by answering questions up to the point and referring users to human operators where necessary. To make everything work even more smoothly, AI-driven assistants supply human operators with information about the case, so the agent knows the problem before speaking to the customer. Most popular tools include Zendesk – a popular customer service platform that offers everything needed for customer support, or Help Scout – it makes interactions more human.

Personalization is another way to user’s hearts. Then customer needs to interact with human agents they want this interaction to be as quick and qualitative as possible. That’s where AI does its job – by collecting historical data and context about the customer and providing it to the human agent, so he could quickly find a solution or answer. Moreover, AI tools can get insights about customer behavior, predict trends, and plan personalized offerings.

And finally, security aspect of SaaS. Machine Learning and AI are becoming the most effective security patrol for SaaS providers. Because of AI capabilities to learn from the actions of a hacker, it’s easier for security services to detect and prevent new threats.

PaaS

Platform-as-a-Service is a way to improve customer retention. Once companies acquire enough clients it is important that those users won’t run away to rivals. PaaS enables companies to expand their original product by letting customers choose add-on services or apps. There are a lot of advantages PaaS provides: pay as you go method, rapid delivery of new capabilities, scalable environment, speed, flexibility, and agility.

For example, pay as you go method is very practical for customer because he’s being charged only for those apps he used. The huge benefit of this method is that there are no wasted resources. Users can choose CPU, memory, storage, security, operating system or any other software necessary to run their environment.

Using a PaaS to deploy and run applications boosters your agility. Nowadays business is changing extremely fast, so in order to compete, you need to transform new ideas into applications as quickly as possible. PaaS helps companies to react fast to changes and opportunities because there are no large up-front costs associated with typical application development.

PaaS offers dynamic scaling. Most PaaS providers offer all of the hardware and infrastructure needed for your business development. You don’t have to worry about platform development anymore because it scales along with your business.

Mobile SaaS

Another SaaS trend impossible to ignore – mobile SaaS. “The need for flexibility, scale, and ease of deployment and use is driving adoption of SaaS to support mobile enterprise strategies. … This is a particularly attractive proposition for small and midsized businesses.” Says Strategy Analytics. So, there’s no surprise that small and medium businesses are implementing mobile SaaS into their activity. But why is it so? Here are some reasons why businesses tend to invest more money in mobile SaaS in 2019.

Accessibility

You can reach a greater audience while expanding your business website to mobile form. Most users don’t like to open their laptops every time they need to work, so making your SaaS available on mobile makes your software accessible at all times and all places. As mobile phones are becoming bigger, with a better phone screen, it gets easier to use a smartphone as a business tool.

Better communication

Mobile apps provide a much faster way to communicate with your customers. Moreover, it’s a great way to remind them about yourself by sending them personalized offers. Mobile SaaS increases not only the number of customers, but it also keeps your clients coming back.

Boost your business

Apps reduce the cost of marketing, advertising, and staff requirements. You are able to send out notifications at a faster speed while saving a lot of time and money, so you make more profit and have more money to invest into your business.

Vertical SaaS

Horizontal SaaS has been around in the market for over a decade. This type of software provides service that covers a big part of the market, through different industries. The opposite of horizontal SaaS is vertical SaaS. Vertical SaaS produce software that focuses on specific industry, like insurance, health care, banks or construction companies. Lately, vertical SaaS are achieving higher valuations in the market. The median vertically-focused public SaaS company was trading at 6.8x revenue compared to 3.8x for horizontal SaaS. That’s because the flexibility to adapt new demands of user-base decreases churn rate and helps to upsell opportunities with its current customer base.

Vertical SaaS customers are likely to be happier and buy more from the vertically focused vendor because products are crafted exactly for the specific type of market. Over the time, vertical SaaS companies are able to add more products to the portfolio that serve the same client type who bought the initial product. That means that the market for vertical oriented SaaS might be smaller than horizontal SaaS, though there are less competitors for vertical SaaS owners, so it’s easier to enter the market.

Because of all the competition, it is almost impossible to be dominant in the market for horizontal SaaS founders. However, it doesn’t apply to vertical SaaS. Since it’s particular to a specific industry, there’s a big chance for vertical SaaS founders to take most of the market share.

Final Thoughts

Artificial Intelligence, Paas, Mobile SaaS, and vertical SaaS are now shaping the SaaS market. By adapting those trends early, you can leave your competitors behind and keep up with the market leaders by offering the newest and most technologically advanced products. One of the best places to stay up to date are conferences, where gathers SaaS lovers and shares their knowledge about SaaS, business, innovation and many other noteworthy subjects. Read more 10 Conferences for SaaS Lovers to Attend in 2019.