The SaaS industry is at a pivotal juncture. With anticipated global growth set to reach $247 billion in 2024, there’s no question that the industry is growing rapidly. However, it’s also facing significant headwinds as funding decreases. 

This puts many SaaS businesses in a precarious position. While there’s still ample opportunity to increase market share and accelerate growth, there are also risks. Consequently, many business leaders face the pressure of driving revenue aggressively while working within tighter budget constraints.

To navigate this situation successfully, you must be able to quickly adapt to changes in the market. This agility is only possible with the right operational infrastructure. 

Learn how you can address these six trends by integrating your tech stack and automating your processes. 

1. Economic slowdown

As economic conditions worsen, SaaS companies are cutting costs. Consequently,  your teams will be tasked with doing more with less. This challenge is exacerbated by inefficient operations that hinder your progress. 

One major cause of inefficient operations is disparate SaaS applications. When your systems aren’t integrated, data becomes siloed and teams rely on slow manual processes to transfer data between systems. This not only takes up your team’s valuable time, but also causes errors and inconsistencies that can lead to poor customer experiences.

By integrating your tech stack, you can automate your manual data entry tasks. This allows you to speed up your processes, free up your teams, and reduce errors. 

2. Lack of technical resources

Skilled developers are becoming difficult to find and expensive to keep. A study by Zippia found that 70% of developers have been in their role for two years or less. This can pose a significant problem as you look to integrate your systems. With limited resources to tackle integrations, your teams can quickly end up buried with integration backlogs–preventing them from focusing on strategic projects that propel your business forward.

Rather than relying on custom point-to-point integration that requires developer resources, you can utilize an advanced iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service). Advanced iPaaS solutions are built with non-technical users in mind, so you can empower your business teams to build, manage, and monitor their own integrations. This allows you to offload some of your integration tasks, accelerating automation and eliminating your integration backlog. 

3. AI initiatives

Many businesses have started to adopt AI in their IT and operations teams, and they are seeing early success. In fact, 97% of the 1,200 global IT and operations leaders Celigo surveyed said that AI was critical to driving operational improvements this year.

As you look to adopt AI in your business, you should also consider how AI is being implemented in the tools you use to simplify the user experience and boost productivity. For example, Celigo’s iPaaS leverages AI to help bridge the integration knowledge gap between technical and non-technical users. With our Knowledge Bot, users can explore proven integration assets and reuse them to accelerate development. On top of that, Celigo’s AI-powered error management auto-resolves 95% of all errors, reducing the burden on your technical teams. 

4. Compliance and data privacy risks

The plethora of SaaS applications needed to run your business can cause significant challenges when it comes to meeting data privacy and compliance requirements. This is especially true when you utilize manual processes to move sensitive data across systems. 

By leveraging an iPaaS to integrate your systems, you can ensure your data is secure. For instance, Celigo’s iPaaS encrypts data end-to-end in motion and at rest and is persistent only long enough for it to be moved. Additionally, our robust administration capabilities, including monitoring, activity logging, and connector policy management, provide the visibility needed to ensure adherence to industry standards. 

5. Inaccurate data

To navigate the volatile SaaS market, you need real-time, accurate data to base your business decisions on. Unfortunately, accessing this data can be difficult, as siloed systems prevent you from getting a holistic view. Even with your teams reconciling data from multiple systems to pull together reporting, analysis isn’t fast, accurate, or comprehensive enough. 

With an integrated tech stack, you can automatically sync data across all your platforms. This allows you to see the same, real-time data in all of your systems. It also eliminates errors caused by manual data entry. Now, you can make data-driven decisions and quickly react to changes in your customer base. 

6. Increasing customer expectations

With so much competition in the SaaS industry, customer expectations are higher than ever before, and customers expect excellence at every stage, from prospecting to implementation. Businesses that fail to meet these expectations often face increased churn and decreased net dollar retention. 

To prevent this churn at your business, you need access to real-time product usage data. This can be difficult to achieve when your data is siloed in your systems and inaccessible for your customer success teams. 

By integrating your storage and analytics databases with your customer relationship management (CRM) system, you can equip your teams with automatic updates on product usage. This allows you to ensure you’re getting in front of accounts at risk of churn and improving their experience. 

Are you ready to start making the most of your tech stack and achieving more with less? Learn how to automate your SaaS processes end-to-end with our ebook, “Empowering SaaS businesses through integration: A playbook.”