Why Community-Centric Saas Is the Future

As Justin Trudeau famously said at last year’s Davos: “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.” With change comes opportunity – the opportunity to grow your business by creating new expectations among your customers in regards to what’s truly possible.

Just look at the nexus of technological forces taking over our world: the convergence of cloud, mobile, big data, and social is creating genuinely disruptive solutions. Uber and Airbnb have changed entire industries forever, for example. And that’s not good news if you are the incumbent, relying on a traditional approach to software solutions.

Of course, in our digital world, shiny consumer-focused technology often gets the most attention — but B2B is what keeps the lights on. After all, B2B means people buying from people, so it’s a much more community-centric business model. And when it comes to the public sector, B2B is what keeps people progressing – which is where our expertise comes in.

At UKCloud, we know you specialise in software development – but we also know that doesn’t mean you can’t do more. Disrupt, or be disrupted. There’s no need to be paralysed by ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’; with the right help, you, too, can use cloud, mobile, big data, and social to disrupt your market before someone else eats your lunch.

Contemporary issues faced by the public sector call for a community-driven digital approach. Cloud technology enables collaboration to tackle our biggest challenges, but an acute fear of failure is holding IT leaders back from taking the plunge to the service model. But the market is changing.

New software providers are driving competition and customers no longer want to be responsible for software on-premises, they want to consume it as a service, where you become responsible for the hosting, infrastructure and more flexible commercial model. In fact, it’s estimated that the global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market will reach $117 billion by the end of 2022.

And although such fear is understandable, it’s important to continue evolving. For instance, health and education organisations continue to steadily increase usage of cloud, particularly for off-site infrastructure in health and SaaS applications focused on better student experience in higher and further education.

But what’s right for your organisation? To start, imagine enriching your user’s experience through mobile apps; imagine helping them make better decisions through machine-learning; and imagine taking a larger share of your customer’s spend by delivering a better service to your customers and their customers not just software.

By harnessing the power of cloud to deliver your SaaS, you also unlock the potential to innovate faster. Indeed, according to Eurostat, 41.9% of British enterprises use some kind of cloud service, whereas EU-wide the average is 28.2%. Traditional software methods meant that you could only change your software once a year or so. The agile development inherent with SaaS means that new features can be released in real-time, any time.

As I said, change is happening at an ever-increasing pace; at UKCloud, we can help you deliver your own changes at a suitably swift speed too. Our upcoming whitepaper explores the business case for transformation from a traditional software product vendor to a cloud-enabled software service business, providing high-level insights into the key transformational activities — from product development and operations to sales and marketing, plus everything in between.