As the world continues to feel the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, everyone from startups to unicorns is feeling the burn. While some companies make layoffs others continue to announce impressive funding rounds.
Earlier this week, SourceDay, a leading supplier collaboration engine of the direct spend industry announced it had closed a $12.5 million Series B round of funding. This comes at a time when manufacturers and distributors depend on supply chain software and innovation more than ever as they are faced with impacts of COVID-19.
Though, this begs the question: what's going to happen to the software as service (SaaS) sector, which was poised for incredible growth? At the end of 2019, Gartner predicted that the SaaS cloud application industry would be worth $143.7 billion by 2022—a level of growth that would shape SaaS trends in 2020.
As companies evolve and turn to remote solutions, this has the potential to boost the SaaS sector. Zoom is one of many SaaS providers revolutionizing how workers, students, and communities are connecting right now. The company has also made a number of features free during the coronavirus pandemic.
While the coronavirus hit most businesses hard, what we also saw was a dip in subscriptions. Though, Boston-based software company Profitwell released new data that shows that there has been a rebound in subscriptions following weeks of declining numbers.
It might be too early to get excited about a bounce back, but things aren't looking as bad as we thought.
Microsoft announced that in the week beginning March 12, Teams added 12 million daily users, which is a 37% increase. Microsoft also announced changes designed to improve services. Meanwhile messaging and collaboration provider, Slack reported a 20% increase in messages per day, with quarterly net new paid subscribers more than doubling. This is in addition to SaaS company Cleanshelf completing an $8 million Series A funding round.
CEO, co-founder and chief architect of iboss, Paul Martini is apprehensive. He warns that while this has caused "an explosion in the use of cloud-based SaaS applications like Google Docs and Microsoft Office365," the exponential increase in bandwidth and connectivity means that the technology required to provide fast, secure connections has lagged and could create cybersecurity issues.
