Over the last decade, we’ve witnessed the domination of SaaS companies in every industry. If you look at the top 10 publicly traded SaaS companies (as of January 11, 2022), their market cap is a combined ~$1.25T. While this sounds great, it shows competition is fierce as they all have startups aiming for them. SaaS companies need to use many strategies to gain a competitive edge. But most of all, they must move fast. And taking a lesson from the past, time savings will increasingly become more valuable.
Specialization Matters
Like any other domain, the software industry is getting specialized over time. As a result, successful software companies increasingly focus on building solutions to address the challenge they know best and choose to embed the technologies outside their core competency to save time and money.
Database solutions are a technology that all SaaS companies need to create their platforms, but SaaS companies don’t build their own database technologies. They choose the best solution for their application. If each company had to build its own database tech, no SaaS company could ever move quicklyfast.
And that’s exactly what SaaS companies need to be successful: native technology that saves them both time and money. Database solutions are one area, but the rise of cloud platforms also illustrates this trend. AWS has shown how much easier it is to create a SaaS application when you don’t have to worry as much about the hosting infrastructure. This equals faster time to market and less capital in the early days of a new company.
Why Not Analytics Too
Analytics is an area that also fits this description. It’s a solution that nearly every SaaS company is expected to offer within their application, yet the traditional business intelligence (BI) companies never pivoted enough to adequately serve SaaS applications. Yes, they all have an “embedded analytics” feature, but it’s just that: a feature. SaaS companies need more than a nice-to-have as their needs are different from the internal, line-of-businessline of business use cases. The traditional BI companies are still selling a standalone BI solution wrapped around a marketing campaign that leads you to think otherwise, but in reality, they’re all difficult to implement platforms that rarely offer time or money savings.
To be clear, OEM solutions are not a new idea, but the rise of SaaS has changed the game. Embedded BI has given way to Infused Analytics, an evolution of an old category that helps SaaS companies to do more. Infused Analytics is designed to be much more than a visualization tool, but also to collect, transform, analyze and provide automation solutions. Using data to enhance a SaaS application can be complicated and building it yourself is costly, but it doesn’t have to be anymore.
When SaaS companies focus on building their core platform, they can better address the needs of their customers. And when SaaS companies find solutions to address complex services such as analytics, they can quickly gain an even greater competitive advantage. This is how leading SaaS companies move fast and focus on the growing adoption of their platform.
Learn more about embedded analytics for SaaS companies at qrvey.com/demo
