Top 7 SaaS Applications for IT Companies
Nowadays many businesses choose to deploy SaaS services. To be more accurate, most departments use between 40 and 60 different applications, companywide – 200 applications. IT organizations are not the exception here. That’s why, in this article, we’d like to overview the average SaaS applications used in IT companies (specific coding-related applications are not considered) that solve basic organizational tasks.
As more and more organizations across different industries are going the SaaS way, a Statista study predicts the market share to cross about 190 billion euros in the US by 2025. Statista also claims that the SaaS industry will reach a worth of around 123 billion USD in 2022. Why are so many companies across the globe choosing SaaS solutions?
The first and the most important thing is that with SaaS services companies don’t need to purchase very expensive software and install it. Additionally, using SaaS you can access the data, which is centrally stored, from any spot of the world, from any device, through a web browser and an internet connection. Also, it minimizes manual work, and, as a result, the possibility of human error, which, unfortunately, can happen to anyone. One more strong reason to consider SaaS tools usage is that it provides flexibility and facilitates strategic business operations for the organizations.
Advantages of using SaaS applications
Businesses of all sizes (small, medium, enterprise) easily manage their business operations by using affordable yet powerful SaaS applications. They can help companies to increase productivity and operational efficiency, contributing to the organization’s growth and development.
Some of the top advantages of the SaaS model are:
Increased flexibility
SaaS is ideal for agile businesses, as it offers more flexibility. It’s easier to purchase a license and pay for it monthly or yearly, without thinking of the apps’ installation and maintenance processes. If users want to stop using the service, they can just cancel the subscription. They can also downgrade or upgrade services to gain necessary features. That’s so simple.
Lower initial costs
From the financial perspective, the flexibility mentioned above brings additional benefits. Once a company decides to purchase the subscription to the required service, there is no longer a need to bear the expenses of hardware purchase, provisioning, operation, as well as installation, and support.
24/7 accessibility
SaaS applications can run on an internet browser, regardless of the operating system (OS) used to access it. So, there is no need to worry about the compatibility of your OS and the SaaS application you want to deploy. Additionally, as SaaS services can be used on mobile devices, they can be used even if the employee is far from the workplace and office computer.
Data and analytics
SaaS applications also provide users with extensive reporting and visualization tools that make business processes more transparent and allow in-depth analysis of users’ activities in numbers and percents. This comes in handy for those organizations that use KPI to reward employees.
Automatic upgrades
The point is that every SaaS application developer strives to constantly improve the solution it sells. Such improvements allow the developer company to keep up with the evolving tech environment and keep customers satisfied. So, companies and people that purchase SaaS solutions no longer need to worry about service maintenance and updates.
Data security
The SaaS model allows customers to store and backup data on internet servers and access that data from different endpoints, sometimes it may create different kinds of security threats. However, the constant development of cloud technology provides high-quality data security solutions for clients, involving tools such as multi-factor authentication and anti-phishing programs.
Top SaaS products for IT
Today companies are free to choose SaaS applications for accomplishing numerous business tasks related to accounting, customer relationship management, customer support, project management, document management, cross-functional communication, etc.
Below, you can see a list of the top 7 SaaS tools for small and medium IT companies that we find to be useful to achieve various organizations’ goals.
Customer support – Zendesk
Source: Zendesk
The company was founded in 2007 in Denmark. Now it is one of the biggest SaaS companies in the US. Zendesk has over 160,000 paid customers from around the globe thanks to its efficient and flexible SaaS solutions.
Zendesk is a customer service software and a support ticketing system that helps small, medium, and large organizations improve customer relationship management. With Zendesk companies can integrate the other support channels (for instance, Email), as well as integrate with third-party solutions like Jira (powered by Atlassian).
Zendesk improves the productivity of the support team and increases customer loyalty and satisfaction. Moreover, users can set up self-service support services to help customers search for and find answers to their questions by themselves. Some of the most popular and useful products are Zendesk for Service and Zendesk for Sales.
Software development – GitHub
Source: GitHub
Established in 2008 in San Francisco in California, the company has now gone on to become the biggest platform. GitHub facilitates the contribution to users’ open source projects – currently it has over 73 million users for over 200 million projects.
GitHub is a superior Internet hosting for software development. With GitHub software development, community management and team collaboration become a piece of cake.
It’s important to note, GitHub is a repository. So, it helps developers to present their works to the public. Today, when searching for new recruits for their project, most companies look into the GitHub profiles. If the developer’s profile is available, they will have a higher chance of being recruited.
Additionally, this SaaS product has a mobile version that allows developers to create and enhance their software or apps faster, no matter where they are in the world.
Team communication – Slack
Source: Slack
Slack is an application that simplifies team communication and collaboration for companies of any size. This agile app can be effectively integrated with lots of other productivity tools. Since the year 2013, Slack has been the glue that binds working teams together, and now it has over 12 million active users, more than 119k paid consumers globally.
Using Slack team members can participate in a general chat discussion, collaborate for team projects, combine messaging, video, and voice calls, create channels, and do lots more. Additionally, if the team members are traveling to a new time zone, they can update the local time zone in Slack. It’s also worth mentioning that Slack offers a free version of the app.
Accounting – Xero
Source: Xero
Xero is one of the popular cloud-based software for accounting, released by Xero Limited in 2006. Based in New Zealand, it also has multiple office locations all around the world with a global team of over 3,500 employees. This powerful software is suitable for businesses of small and medium sizes.
To start with, Xero offers a wide range of add-ons for all company needs. With Xero, small businesses can handle accounting, as well as finance and inventory management. Users and executives can connect their bank accounts and import the bank records into Xero in a blink of an eye. It’s also possible to generate personalized invoices and send them to users.
Document management – Dropbox
Source: Dropbox
Dropbox is a cloud-based storage solution for documents and data that is frequently used for file backup and sharing, as well as collaboration and document management. The company started back in 2007 in California, is thriving having more than 600 million users and over 500,000 teams across all major operating systems.
As a robust tool, Dropbox offers file and cloud storage, client software, and operates on iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux. This SaaS product has a freemium model. It is a business model in which a company offers basic or limited features to users at no cost and then charges a premium for supplemental or advanced features. So, Dropbox users can get more capacity on purchases, if necessary. The most popular products are Dropbox Plus, Dropbox Professional, Dropbox Business, Dropbox Enterprise, Dropbox Family.
Customer Relationship Management – Salesforce
Source: Salesforce
Salesforce is broadly known as №1 CRM platform with more than 50 cloud-based products. The company started its journey in San Francisco in the year 1999, with the first office located in a small apartment. Today the company has multiple offices spread across the globe with more than 10,000 staff members.
Thanks to its reliable solutions like customer relationship management, Salesforce continues to satisfy the needs of more than 150,000 organizations, regardless of their size and the field of interest. There are some of the most used Salesforce products: Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Tableau Analytics, myTrailhead, Commerce Cloud.
Video communication – Zoom
Source: Zoom
The enterprise has presented itself in 2011, by releasing a solid video communication tool that was well-received by users. This SaaS product is highly appreciated in the technology world today due to the pandemics – the previous year Zoom saw a growth of around 470% in its business consumer base.
Zoom attracts professionals who want to facilitate audio and video conferencing, webinars, meetings, live events, and messaging, as well as other collaborations. The outstanding feature of Zoom is that both the presenter and viewer can see each other during the conference.
One more remarkable thing about Zoom is that it offers a free version of the app for meetings under 40 minutes. With it, users can host up to 100 participants. Also, recording the full video and watching the replay of the meeting (including the questions on the chat window) are available, too. Well-known Zoom products: Zoom Meetings, Zoom Webinars, Zoom Chats, Zoom Phone.
For more information on Zoom, its products, and pricing, as well as ways to cut down the expenses on your Zoom account, read our article.
The presented list contains not all the leading apps used in the average IT company. Typically, there are a lot more of them, and usually, the difficulty here lies in the monitoring of utilized licenses and subscriptions, as well as the management of increasing expenditures.
Optimize your SaaS cost with Binadox
Mostly known as a Сloud cost optimization tool, Binadox also serves as a SaaS subscriptions management platform. With Binadox, it’s easier to keep the app’s inventory and be aware of all the licenses purchased and assigned, observe their utilization rates, and optimize costs.
You can use the SaaS Utilization Dashboard to get better visibility into the cost of the SaaS applications deployed in the company, as well as identify how much they’re utilized.
Additionally, numerous licenses used in the company can be easily managed with the help of the License manager, which includes:
Renewals Calendar helps users stay aware of the next billing cycle and eliminate the wasteful apps (barely used or unused) before the new billing cycle begins.
The Invoices section gathers all the received and uploaded invoices in one place. It can significantly facilitate financial reporting.
The Unassigned Licenses section helps to view the licenses that haven’t been assigned, so the companies can easily get rid of them and save money.
Want to experience all the benefits Binadox can offer?
Sign up for a free trial or book a demo to optimize your SaaS expenditures.