SaaS development has seen many innovations and revelations since its inception as a viable platform a few years ago, and it looks as if this trend isn’t going to stop in the foreseeable future. As SaaS continues to be further empowered by technology, bandwidth and acceptance from users at large, it’s interesting to consider what trends may be in the near future for SaaS.
2012 saw a boom in SaaS development in the financial and gaming markets, but saw a marked decline in the success of some social and financial SaaS success, but what might 2013 bring? What trends will we see in 2013 in the SaaS industry that will yet again change the way we view computing, productivity and being digital?
Let’s take a look at some of the trends we’d like to see pick up steam in 2013.
A move of CRM systems to a social SaaS platform would be absolutely appreciated by everyone on either side of this coin. Nobody likes wading through phone trees, waiting on hold, or dealing with pesky help desk systems to have their issues addressed. Administrators and CS professionals are overworked by this inefficient system as well. The technology for SaaS in social media form to handle CRM exists, but companies and developers just haven’t seemed to connect these dots in the past.
A move of CRM to Twitter or some as yet undeveloped social media SaaS platform would revolutionize how CRM works, and greatly boost the instant gratification and efficiency of customer service as a whole. 2013 may be the year this is accomplished, or at least the year in which its foundations are laid.
Gaming actually needs to stem its SaaS migration for a couple years, while the existing major outlets catch up with the severe changes that have been brought on by it in the past. SaaS development in this field has been primarily in the DLC provision and the increase of online multiplayer inclusion. Right now, gaming companies are taking wrongful advantage of this DLC SaaS concept by charging full price for broken or incomplete games which they then charge additional money to patch or enhance via paid DLC.
So, for 2013, we’d like to see gaming SaaS slow down and catch up with itself, and work out the unscrupulous bugs which currently plague its business models.
For businesses, continued migration to cloud-oriented distribution should see a major speed increase in 2013, as the bandwidth (including 4G for mobile) becomes commonplace this year. As a result, with cloud-oriented SaaS, updates and maintenance should be instantaneous and more or less invisible to the consumer end. This may see a hike in price with subscription-based SaaS for businesses as they tack on maintenance and development fees, but if they are wise, it will be a miniscule raise of perhaps $2.00 USD for basic subscriptions, and not a significant curve.
Business software in 2013 should also see a marked increase of integration with social media, as the convenience of Twitter and other forms of communication are just as practical for business.
However, Twitter and other social SaaS platforms will have to allow some level of restrictive privacy to be placed on communications before businesses trust such a currently visible form of communication to be used for intra-office exchange, and for obvious reasons.
SaaS development should speed up in 2013 in most demographics, and stabilize in others. It may not be a year of firsts like 2012, but it should be a year of refinements in SaaS development, not unlike 2011.