What Comes After SaaS?

&quot;In other words, the ability to write and deploy code is no longer a core value driver&quot; - I do not think it ever was, it is always what that code solves for customer. Ability to write and deliver code is just a way how you can get money out of core value.<p>Nitpicking, how SaaS stocks could plunge?<p>I think the good point is: &quot;The monthly contract value is often far less than the customer acquisition costs (mostly sales and integration)&quot;<p>You do not price your SaaS based on hosting costs, if yes then those SaaS solutions will simply run out of money. You cannot run growing SaaS on 1&#x2F;10 slashed price, you have to fix bugs, add new features and evolve. I can build clone of some SaaS and run it on Linode with 1&#x2F;10 of costs but I am not sales person, and not marketing guy. I would not have money to evolve and it is not fire and forget running on cheap hardware.<p>So article is not worth reading, nothing exciting.

I don&#x27;t remember where I read this, but it stuck with me:<p>A bag of coffee beans from the grocery might cost you 10c a cup. That&#x27;s a Product.<p>A cup of coffee at a greasy spoon diner might cost you $1. That&#x27;s a Service.<p>A latte at a fancy cafe might cost you $4. That&#x27;s because you are paying for the whole Experience of the fancy cafe.<p>So, what comes after SAS? SAE.

It&#x27;s incredible how myopic this article is towards web development SaaS products.<p>There are a whole slew of SaaS products for business applications that have nothing to do with what the author is talking about (think SalesForce, Workday, ServiceNow, etc) that totally eclipse the Segment, mParticle, etc&#x27;s of the world, in terms of size, complexity and<p>The &quot;what comes next in SaaS&quot; is predicated on what become before SaaS, which was license software that businesses had to maintain. The next evolution of SaaS, IMHO, is one which requires zero consulting&#x2F;integration&#x2F;implementation. I dare say &quot;AI&quot; will change that, but this is the biggest friction to new software production adoption.

&gt; SaaS is dying. Here’s why.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I agree with the listed reasons. From what I understood, the author tries to prove that &quot;SaaS is eating SaaS&quot; and SaaS abundance&#x2F;switching costs are prohibitive to new SaaS ventures. This doesn&#x27;t seem like a very good argument for &quot;SaaS is dying.&quot; May be, it&#x27;s better suited for &quot;it&#x27;s becoming more difficult to enter the SaaS game.&quot;

Much of the value of a SAAS&#x2F;Cloud service is that the operational costs are so reduced. We talk a lot here about the explosion in complexity in tech (front end stacks, different OSs, security, mobile+desktop etc.) but rarely about how to really manage them.<p>SAAS services are typically wildly, crazily cheaper than hiring people to either do the services or to support an internally setup and managed application to do the same.

A lot of points in this article resonated well with me. Especially this:<p>&gt; Companies that focus too much on technology without putting it in context of a customer problem will be caught between a rock and a hard place — or as I like to say, “between open source and a cloud place.”<p>I&#x27;m in the second year of a SaaS selling to entreprises. We are doing ok but all of our customers are nearly identical (it&#x27;s in the public sector). We would love to have lots of different types of customers but we seem to be stuck. Our customers are probably buying our knowledge as much as our product.<p>I would say unless your tech is groundbreaking and not easy to copy, domain knowledge will likely be your differentiator. But that&#x27;s harder to scale.

I think the hole in many SAAS products is the assumption that the end-user has a development team, or that every other SAAS company is going to integrate with their API.<p>At the end of the day, a small business has much larger fish to fry than trying to figure out how to plug product A into product B, though it is a massive problem for every small business. This isn&#x27;t solved by hiring programmers, but by downloading data and inserting into macro-enabled Excel sheets. You can hire 5 Excel gurus for the same price as you can a Jr Developer (a typical SMB isn&#x27;t able to figure out if said dev is worth anything).<p>The fact is, the end-user really doesn&#x27;t give a care about &quot;who&quot; but &quot;does it work?&quot; Integrating all the pieces and parts is a very complicated and time-consuming thing for small businesses to deal with.<p>What comes post-SAAS? A fully integrated suite of products that does what the end-user wants. SMBs would be super stoked to have a product that does inventory, label-printing, CRM, market analysis, sales channels, etc, and pay that to one company. I think that there ought to be an in-between layer. If a some companies could offer a solution that integrate all of the SAAS products needed to run a business, packaged in one place, entire industries would end up toppling. The price differential wouldn&#x27;t even have to be that high. The company would save the end-user months of research and time-wasting presentations.

In my opinion, SaaS is being eaten by largest PaaS providers : GOOG, AMZN and MSFT. They built so many free or cheap services that killed a lot of independent service and product providers. You can&#x27;t compete with them because they own the platform you&#x27;re on, they can always clone you and make the clone cheaper and more integrated with their platform.

I think I see what he&#x27;s saying.<p>In some places, there&#x27;s a gap between open-source libraries that I can find, and services that Do One Thing.<p>Recently, I dived into the available options for online document signing.<p>I needed one thing (document signing) done well, with a few variations based on the few different integration situations I had.<p>Almost everyone had the same offering, which wasn&#x27;t programmatic or flexible, but <i>was</i> drop-in (iframes). I could only do what they&#x27;d though to make possible.<p>On the other hand, I have trouble imaging what, say, a ruby gem for this would look like. Seems like it&#x27;d be pretty involved.<p>Compare this to, say, SendGrid, and other email providers. I get a lot of flexible functionality around one thing (sending emails), but the interaction is very much on my terms (via their API) rather than theirs (dropping in an iframe).<p>The only exception I found in the document signing world was HelloSign, which has a lot more in common with SendGrid than, say, DocuSign or RightSignature.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is quite what he&#x27;s talking about, but I do think it&#x27;s indicative of the direction and forces in play.

The metered, utility like pricing that Amazon does seems like it&#x27;d be compelling for a lot of SaaS products.

&gt; Peter was annoyed. An energetic young fellow — he faced a pretty serious problem: people weren’t even willing to try his company’s analytics product. Even though it was (in 2012) a very immature market — and the current offerings lacked a lot of what customers wanted. Why? ... So Peter and his team build middleware to make it easy to switch between SaaS providers (maybe then people might try his system).<p>This is a gross misrepresentation of the whole situation. It reads as if Peter was a biz guy who was having trouble selling the analytics software because of the involved &quot;switching costs&quot;. Peter and his team, in their own admission, were trying too hard to build a product without a focus on what they were solving. Analytics space is too broad and complex to be attacked all at once. It&#x27;s not wise to build a GA competitor but several analytics companies with a clear focus have succeeded in the past.<p>Segment wasn&#x27;t trying to build a &quot;middleware to switch between companies&quot;. The product was almost an accident of a building a small library for themselves to avoid mantaining code for multiple APIs.

SaaSaS. Finally, people will work on their regex skills.

Hosting federated apps as extensions in your browser (Mastadon, etc.)

Is the core argument here is that SaaS enables the success of software companies that have little value and that &quot;post-SaaS&quot; means that those companies die?<p>That doesn&#x27;t really ring true to me. That already happens, doesn&#x27;t it? SaaS as a pricing model or platform strategy in and of itself won&#x27;t do shit for you if you have a terrible idea, right?<p>Or is the author trying to argue that SaaS will eventually become a race to the bottom and that the market should shift towards value-based pricing?

I also took a similar stab at next-gen of SaaS few months back:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laktek.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;11&#x2F;end-of-the-first-wave-of-saas&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laktek.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;11&#x2F;end-of-the-first-wave-of-sa...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laktek.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;12&#x2F;next-wave-of-saas&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laktek.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;12&#x2F;next-wave-of-saas&#x2F;</a>

Software should be priced on value added, not cost to provide.

An interesting read but this kind of predictions don&#x27;t work &quot;in advance&quot;. Usually it&#x27;s needed for some market player that is still unknown to show up first. That player will then serve as an example and solidify the argument. To know&#x2F;feel what SaaS 2.0 is, in advance, would mean that you are the one driving it. SaaS 2.0 is not here yet.

Maybe hardware as a service? Perhaps specialized chips constructed by software is the next evolution in efficiency?<p>You could have a data center, chip designer, fabricator, and software service.. all in one. Unlikely, maybe... but the question is pie in the sky anyways.

AI as a Service is what is next.<p>No UI is the next step, in my opinion.

DAaaS - Decentralized Applications as a Service

Lexicographically, &quot;SaaSa&quot;. Software as a Service architecture?

&gt; Companies that focus too much on technology without putting it in context of a customer problem will be caught between a rock and a hard place — or as I like to say, “between open source and a cloud place.”<p>Comparing a cloud to a rock, the author needs to work on their metaphors.

Utterly disagree.<p>Workday (WDAY) and Veeva (VEEV) as great examples of just recently rallied SaaS stocks.<p>The true value of SaaS is just unfolding, not being stuck on old versions is just now sinking in. The above companies have customers go beyond the 5 year, sometimes 10 year mark - but they&#x27;re not on some outdated version, figuring out how to patch that shit up. This is a revolution in enterprise that has not fully sunken in, there are still a lot of companies out there only dipping their toes into going SaaS.<p>Vertical clouds such as Veeva, as in going deep into one specific target industry, are a pretty good model to follow. Customer acquisition costs are super low, there is data out there to confirm this. All a reference sell, as CIOs talk to each other in a specific industry. Build a positive reputation, the sale follows. Product leads the way, not marketing.<p>The moat here being super deep industry expertise and data accumulation that gets harder and harder to compete with.<p>There will be something after SaaS, but it will take a while and it is utterly unclear what it will be.<p>Mainframes - Client&#x2F;Server - SaaS - ??

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