In enterprise software marketplaces, each participant vendor contributes specialized expertise, functionality, and scale that are essential to building a complete solution for end users—assuming of course, that no single monolithic vendor would as efficiently meet customer needs.

Before software marketplaces, end users would buy software built specifically for their own vertical, such as ‘healthcare clinic management’ or ‘point of sale terminal system’ — or hire a consultant to customize a bespoke solution, since most enterprises didn’t have a deep enough development bench to do it themselves.

Development partners are precious

Consumer software marketplaces are well known, because they live on our smartphones: Apple App Store and Google Play have the markets cornered for their OS users.

These closed economies hit app developers with a 30 percent commission on each transaction, whether for purchasing the app, or even in-app transactions such as game tokens and add-ons. Developers who don’t want to pay the toll simply won’t have their apps listed.

Needless to say, publishers don’t like the arrangement. Epic Games vs. Apple are still in court today after the popular Fortnite game got kicked off the App Store for having its own internal payment system. European Union regulators are now looking at breaking up such monopolies.

In an enterprise software marketplace, application partners are highly valued, because no vendor’s system is an island unto itself. Encouraging a developer ecosystem creates more choices for end customers, who need to add new functionality that integrates with existing systems.

Vendors now get exposure to the world’s largest cloud services market at a low cost ranging from 1.5% to 3% depending on average sales volume. Even if vendors on the AWS marketplace offer functionality that overlaps with AWS alternatives, that’s fine, because AWS still sells more cloud infrastructure either way.

Across the pond, the Atlassian Marketplace generated more than $500M in annual sales by 2022 for their partner developers. Because Atlassian didn’t impose an extreme tax, they were able to bring together a strong set of vendors building add-on software specifically customized for their suite of tools such as Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket.

The wall of modules and integrations

Most enterprise software marketplaces started out as gadget collections. They are not well-planned, arising out of a necessity to provide adapters to the most likely external systems and core systems in play within the end user’s IT environment.

Back in the turn of the century, I designed B2B marketplaces, most of which failed alongside companies like Pets.com in the dot-bomb implosion. Enterprises with tight IT budgets started to expect vendors to include SDKs and integration modules so they could hook up their existing software packages for free.

Salesforce led the way with a marketplace of add-on services to its core CRM platform. Later, we saw the rise of major business process automation, analytics and low-code app design vendors all offering a gadget wall of partner integrations in their own marketplaces.

Even citizen developers were starting to get in on the game, building solutions from a storefront of LEGO-like vendor pieces with snap-to-fit integration ease.

The rise of API, open source and AI

The widespread adoption of SaaS software and cloud services led us to an API-driven consumption model, which changes the game. Instead of building custom integration models for each platform, vendors publish an API spec, allowing developers to build services that connect to it.

Soon, walls of custom integration widgets gave way to API marketplaces, and a surrounding host of related devtest, management, identity and orchestration apps to govern their use.

Open source software underwent its own revolution, with downloadable packages on npm and API integration code in SwaggerHub and git repositories. Open source marketplaces allow developers to contribute innovative efforts to the community in order to benefit development practices as a whole.

GenAI chatbots and image generators are all the rage today, but AI models are even better at speaking the language of API connections than mastering the complex subtleties of human conversation. AIs can act as integration platforms, allowing even non-technical workers to call on a vast array of services, including other AI models behind their own APIs, with natural language queries.

The Intellyx Take

I could go on forever about the subtleties of software marketplace design and economics, which would be outside the scope of this column. 

For instance, I could talk about intra-enterprise marketplaces that allow IT departments to provision employees and provide platform engineering services to developers, with interdepartmental accounting of the value delivered against budget allocations. But enough of that.

As software marketplaces expand to meet future enterprise needs, the most successful ones will hold their vendor communities close, rather than abandon developers or suddenly game the rules against end customers.

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“Infrastructures are continuing to shift to the cloud, while organizations are struggling to operate multiple tools. This is driving a critical need for a centralized view of automated business processes,” said Serge Lucio, vice president and general manager, Agile Operations Division, Broadcom. “Automic SaaS helps organizations unify workload automation, gain critical observability, and simplify orchestration just like our on-premises solution with the additional benefits of lower costs, increased agility, and improved productivity.”

“Automic SaaS offers the same full-featured Workload Automation as on premises while optimizing the TCO, freeing organizations to focus on strategic automation. We’re excited to partner with Broadcom in bringing this modern automation solution to the market,” said Guenter Flamm, managing director, Tricise GmbH.

Complete Automation and Orchestration in SaaS

Automic SaaS is a complete solution that offers advanced workload automation and orchestration across hybrid and hybrid-cloud environments removing islands of automation. Unlike some vendors, including cloud-native automation solutions, Automic SaaS provides robust benefits including:

• Always-on Innovation: Get seamless access to the latest features as soon as they are released, ensuring automation efforts are ahead of the curve.
• Cost Efficiencies: Eliminate infrastructure costs for the automation engine and database, clearing up resources.
• Enhanced Security: Secure TLS networking protecting your data and operations.
• Simplified Agent Deployment and Upgrades: Centralized management saves time and resources and provides self-service to decentralized application groups.
• Expert Conversion Support with specialist partners and purpose-built tools.
• Certified for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud support SAP cloud migration.

Learn more about Automic SaaS from Broadcom by clicking here.

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Internal stakeholders often seek clarity when the company’s growth hinges on product revenue, as it does for many SaaS providers. The sales team is eager to know what new features they’ll have to attract clients, and the marketing team is striving to build the brand and launch effective advertising and PR campaigns at exactly the right moment. Meanwhile, operations managers want to be ready with the resources needed in the days ahead. External clients are also conditioned to ask for a product roadmap, seeking assurance that the vendor is innovative, on top of the market and staying abreast of trends.

For all these reasons, you’re probably faced with regular requests for product roadmaps. Don’t automatically comply. A roadmap is rarely the best way to give any of your stakeholders what they really want – an understanding of your product strategy and direction.

Numerous downsides

There’s an inherent problem with roadmaps. Nobody can predict the future, so no roadmap will ever be 100% accurate. Things change. In fact, constant change is one of the hallmarks of a SaaS business. We need to be super nimble, agile and able to pivot quickly in an industry that’s in perpetual motion. 

When we design a time-driven schedule that commits to delivering X by Y, we’ve created a no-win situation. If we don’t follow our original plan, we lose credibility and the confidence of our customers as well as colleagues. 

On the other hand, if we firmly adhere to a rigid schedule of deliverables, we lose the flexibility we need to adjust to new market conditions or customer needs. Pivoting from a plan takes time and money, slowing production and angering customers and partners. Delays stifle innovation and derail the creative process, frustrating developers. Under the pressure of fixed, unrealistic timelines, many businesses end up making poor decisions that dissatisfy all concerned. 

A smarter solution 

Rather than spelling out specific milestones and deadlines, consider a more fluid approach. If someone asks me where we’re taking a product, I respond with a now/next/later continuum that pointedly does not include a calendar-based timeline spelling out when tasks will be done. Instead, I tell them what we’re currently invested in, what we’re doing next and what we expect to be doing later. Great discussions inevitably follow.

As an R&D organization, we focus on the speed and frequency of delivery, breaking big projects down into bite-sized elements we can release more frequently. Continuous delivery makes much more sense than a predetermined schedule. We don’t assure stakeholders we’ll deliver something by a certain date; we promise to provide enhancements as soon as they’re available. When you roll out a product or feature in frequent iterations over time, customers can enjoy the benefits of the various elements much sooner than if you delayed everything till the whole package was fully completed. In fact, I’ve found that customers often realize that what they truly need is different to what they say they want. Delivering continuously reveals that moment much sooner.

There will be occasions when clients request a roadmap because they’re hoping for a solution to a problem they’re experiencing. In that case, reframe the discussion to focus on the issue and not the timeline. Explore their specific problem and determine how to resolve it. Similarly, if customers anticipate an emerging need, figure out what features and capabilities they want. Build a robust, transparent Feature Request process and be sure to provide concrete feedback showing you hear their concerns and are investing appropriately, even if that means you won’t work on their request. Any time a customer offers product feedback, listen up! You will almost always get added context that will inform future development and might even hear something that deserves immediate resources.

The advantage of fast, frequent updates 

Once you understand your customers’ current and future needs, you can explain your product strategy – where you’re investing to meet today’s needs and solve today’s problems, and where you expect to invest next. That’s much more informative than a four-quarter timeline built on assumptions made today and possibly irrelevant tomorrow.

This strategy makes sense considering the basic concept of SaaS, which eliminates the purchasing of packaged or downloadable software that’s more or less frozen in time. A subscription allows customers to benefit from technology that’s always evolving and improving. Emphasizing that point helps your clients realize the inefficiency of date-driven schedules that actually stifle innovation. 

Product roadmaps have become something of an anachronism in today’s high-speed tech world. That doesn’t mean you won’t get requests for them. But rather than shackling yourself to an unrealistic schedule, train yourself to explain what you’re investing in now, next and later. Concentrate on developing continuous product enhancements that you release frequently, addressing real needs as they arise. Customers will see that you’re moving ahead and ushering them into the future with you.

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First, custom contexts are now generally available for all LaunchDarkly customers. With this, organizations are enabled to create several target objects which can map to a business’s use case.

This provides users with the ability to deliver targeting how they want as well as offers improved control and business alignment for how features are delivered. 

The release of custom contexts also allows for multiple new use cases for LaunchDarkly Experimentation customers, such as the ability to create rules and build experimentation audiences based on different context types. 

In addition, the possibility to randomize experiments on known variables such as device type, browser type, and more, has been expanded. According to LaunchDarkly, this keeps the experiment stable as well as eliminates randomization discrepancies that result from traditional user targeting.

Next, an approvals dashboard has been released in order to assist users in tracking and managing approvals so that they can visualize all approvals in one single dashboard with options to sort and filter by. These options include necessary approver, approval requester, project status, and approval status.

The company has also updated its notification settings, allowing users to control what notifications they would like to receive, such as flag updates or approvals, and how they would like to receive them. 

Furthermore, LaunchDarkly announced a native integration with Microsoft Teams. This enables users to receive personal flag update notifications in real-time, associate chat messages with a flag via flag links, create and subscribe to channels that push flag update notifications, and get notified of approval requests right from within Microsoft Teams.

New RUM integrations for Datadog and AWS users are also available so that Datadog customers can now improve their RUM data with feature flag data from LaunchDarkly.

The team stated that this integration offers users better visibility into which flag variations end-users are experiencing and the impact that those variations have on overall engagement and application performance.

LaunchDarkly also added support for SCIM user and role provisioning in order to enhance the LaunchDarkly and Azure AD SSO integration. With this, users gain more control over provisioning with the real-time updates that SCIM offers, such as automatic de-provisioning.

Identifying flag owners has also been simplified with the addition of the ability to assign a flag maintainer. This allows for the filtering of the flag dashboard to flags maintained by teams, and further promotes flag accountability.

Dark theme is also now generally available in LaunchDarkly as an additional customization option. 

Lastly, the company has reached fedRAMP authorization. With this, government agencies and their commercial partners can utilize the Federal instance of LaunchDarkly’s feature management platform to deliver software and modernize applications with improved control.

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The goal of this release is to minimize the risk that SaaS-to-SaaS presents by allowing teams to manage sanctioned apps and discover apps that have access to the company’s data.

“As SaaS app dependency grows, so too does our comfort level in using these apps — this is why many grant access without considering the possible consequences. As a result, third-party app access has become the new executable file,” said Maor Bin, co-founder and CEO of Adaptive Shield. “Now, with these new capabilities, whether employees have connected 50 to 5000 apps, Adaptive Shield equips security professionals with the solution to regain control over their SaaS Security.”

According to the 2022 SaaS Security Survey Report from Adaptive Shield and the Cloud Security Alliance, 56% of organizations adopting SaaS applications said that their number one concern is the lack of visibility into connected apps. 

These new capabilities are intended to address this challenge that becomes exacerbated when employees connect several SaaS applications to the core stack without understanding the security risks or checking with the security team.

For more information, visit the website. 

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On top of this, the company has released a new study that demonstrates the need for a single, enterprise-wide SaaS DevOps platform with annual SaaS spending reported as $125 billion in 2021. 

According to the company, this platform brings disparate and siloed data together under a singular focus and alleviates the need to build separate development teams, metadata, configurations, profiles, permissions, and packages and release management tactics for end-to-end visibility spanning the SaaS DevOps ecosystem.

Additionally, Opsera’s multi-SaaS and multi-cloud architecture works to allow enterprises to leverage the platform in order to accelerate SaaS DevOps maturity in several SaaS applications. 

Enterprises are also enabled to leverage Opsera’s no-code platform and reusable microservices to improve the velocity of releases. 

“The increased pace of SaaS and the public cloud replacing on-premises solutions will have a global impact on IT operations,” said Vernon Keenan, senior industry analyst at SalesforceDevops.net and author of the study. “As organizations add more critical SaaS applications to their inventories, the need for a cohesive SaaS management strategy, or SaaS DevOps, will grow dramatically in the next five years. With today’s announcement, Opsera is well positioned to help enterprises to streamline their SaaS DevOps and help improve their agility, velocity, security posture and visibility.”

Based on Keenan’s report, SaaS revenue will continue to grow at a 25% rate annually and will reach $279 billion by 2024. The study also showed that 35 new SaaS companies have entered the market since 2018, demonstrating the part that SaaS application expansion has in this growth. 

To learn more and read the full report, see here.

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According to the company, the solution helps by saving developers time and providing them the foundational capabilities to onboard users including provisioning infrastructure for tenants,  monitoring consumption trends, configuring tenant profiles, integrating with a billing system and surfacing key metrics. 

RELATED CONTENT: SaaS backup: A more scalable way to ingest cloud app data

“Think of AWS SaaS Boost like a space launch system for your applications, with all the ground operation and rockets to help you propel and manage your software as a service in the AWS cloud. SaaS Boost significantly offloads development effort by accelerating application transformation to SaaS, freeing up software developers to focus on features that differentiate their product,” Adrian De Luca, the head of partner solution architecture of global ISV build programs at AWS, wrote in a blog post that contains additional details. 

It also includes integrations with other AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).

Since the project was released under the Apache 2.0 license, the code can be customized to meet business requirements. Developers can build connectors to technologies such as OAuth for authorization, Open Policy Agent for control, and OpenTelemetry for observability and more, De Luca explained. 

AWS is also working on building a charter and a set of guiding principles so that users can get the most out of SaaS Boost. 

“Our objective with AWS SaaS Boost is to get great quality software based on years of experience in the hands of as many developers and companies as possible,” De Luca wrote.  “Through a community of builders, our hope is to develop features faster, integrate with a wide range of SaaS software, and to provide a high quality solution for our customers regardless of company size or location.”

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Cleanshelf’s software provides an automated view of all SaaS applications in an enterprise, simplifies management and enables resource optimization, according to the company. 

LeanIX went on to explain that while SaaS adoption is rapidly increasing, it’s happening in a decentralized way, making it difficult to manage costs, security risk and data privacy.

RELATED CONTENT: The resurgence of enterprise architecture

Cleanshelf believes by automatically identifying SaaS applications throughout the enterprise and detecting unused licenses, it can minimize costs by about 15% in the first year. It’s tool is based on integrations with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, spend and contract management solutions as well as identity and single-sign-on (SSO) providers.

“This technology is a perfect match for LeanIX, and as of today, we are adding Cleanshelf’s 40 team members spread across San Francisco, Denver, and Ljubljana to our team. Together we will grow as one to deliver a single outstanding product experience to customers and partners,” André Christ, co-founder and CEO of LeanIX, wrote in a post.

LeanIX is also helping DevOps and engineering teams manage the growing complexity of microservices with the newly announced Microservice Intelligence. 

“Increasing the number of microservices in any organization calls for DevOps teams to manage them across the landscape to achieve development efficiency. It also means companies need to invest in new tools to manage their microservice landscape. At a minimum, these tools must provide visibility across the microservice landscape with automatic discovery and cataloging capabilities, as well as provide insights to measure development KPIs such as deployment frequency,” Marion Richter, directly or product marketing at LeanIX, wrote in a post. 

Microservice Intelligence automatically creates a microservice catalog to provide more transparency and visibility into cloud-native apps, ownership and dependencies. 

In addition, it monitors development frequency, MTTR and failure rates of software services; and automatically maps libraries and versions to microservices to identify and prioritize patches and reduce open-source vulnerabilities. 

“Continuous transformation does not stop by migrating to the cloud,” said Christ. “Virtually every company is now a tech company and increasingly is delivering in-house software. Microservice Intelligence helps customers navigate the microservice landscape and reduce the complexity that occurs when decomposing the monolith into more loosely coupled services.”

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The new offering enables teams to execute codeless test scripts on real devices for native Android and iOS mobile apps, with web support coming soon. Later this year, a test case management product will also launch, according to the company. 

“Customers today are won and lost through digital experiences. That is why the quality of digital assets – mobile apps, websites, voice-driven experiences and more – is critical to get right,” said Doron Reuveni, the CEO of Applause, founder and chairman of the board. “To meet these needs, Applause continues to disrupt the testing market, having evolved from a services and solutions company to one that delivers a complete platform for driving product excellence.”

Hasura 2.0 released
Haura release version 2.0 of its open-source GraphQL Engine and the release enables organizations to deploy REST and GraphQL APIs from one configuration.

This release includes a GraphQL API gateway which provides granular authorization to any GraphQL API and it also supports Google’s BigQuery database in addition to PostgreSQL, SQL Server and MySQL.

Hasura also announced the managed service offering of GraphQL Engine, Hasura Cloud, now has AWS VPC peering capability to securely connect their data and infrastructure to Hasura Cloud in a secure private network.

Planview acquires PPM providers Clarizen and Changepoint
With the acquisition customers of all three platforms will benefit from a premier community of project portfolio management and professional service automation practitioners. 

“The nature of work has changed significantly in recent years, causing leaders across industries to rethink how to best strategically plan, execute, and empower teams in today’s all-digital world. This shift has placed a spotlight on the growing importance and strategic value of Portfolio Management, Work Management and Enterprise Agile Planning capabilities, as evidenced by the recent wave of IPOs, consolidation, and acquisitions of several key players in this category,” Planview wrote in a post.

The acquisition closely follows Planview’s acquisition by TPG Capital and TA Associates in December 2020. 

Pega’s enhancements for low-code mobile app development
The newest features of Pega Mobile provide UX and app authoring enhancements, customizable branding options, and expanded offline capabilities in which Pega mobile apps are designed to be used offline and synced later when an Internet connection is restored.

“Pega Mobile makes it fast and easy for the user to create and manage as many mobile apps as the business needs. Instead of deprioritizing mobile, organizations can adopt a true mobile-first approach with powerful apps that help make them more productive,” said Eric Musser, the general manager of intelligent automation at Pegasystems. 

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 It’s no wonder cloud applications like CRM, Support, ERP or e-commerce tools, have become prime targets for DataOps teams looking for answers about what and why certain things are happening. After all, think about how much business data converges in a CRM system – particularly when it’s integrated with other business systems. It’s a mastered data goldmine!

DataOps teams often identify a high-value target application, like a CRM system, and then explore ways to capture and ingest data from the application via the system’s APIs. In the case of, say, Salesforce, they might explore the Change Data Capture and Bulk APIs. Various teams with different data consumption needs might then use these APIs to capture data for their particular use case, inevitably leading to exponential growth in data copies and compliance exposure. (After all, how do you enforce GDPR or WORM compliance for data replicas tucked away God knows where?!). 

When they encounter API limitations or even application performance issues, DataOps teams then start to replicate data into nearby data lakes. This enables them to create centralized consumption points for the SaaS data outside of the application. Here, storage costs are more favorable and access is ubiquitous. Here, teams typically take a deep breath and start a more organized process for requirements gathering, beginning with the question of “who needs what data and why?”

Meanwhile in a parallel world, IT teams implement data backup strategies for those same cloud applications. If something bad happens (say, data corruption), these critical business systems need to be rapidly recovered and brought back online to keep the business going. Here, standard practice is to take snapshots of data at regular increments either through DIY scripts or with SaaS backup tools. In most scenarios, the backup data is put in cold storage because… well, that’s what you do with data replicas whose sole purpose is to act as an ‘insurance policy’ in case something goes wrong.

 With all of these teams trying to consume the same data in the same organization, it makes sense that costs and maintenance cycles quickly spiral out of control. For every TB of production data, ESG identified that another 9 TB of secondary data is typically generated – rapidly offsetting any cost savings due to ever-decreasing storage costs on public clouds.  

So why are we inflicting this 9X+ data multiplier on ourselves?

One reason is convenience. It’s just easier to walk up, grab what we need and walk away. But convenience can often come at the cost of quality, security and risk: how you do you the data you are grabbing is the best possible dataset the organization has on a particularly entity? This question is particularly important in organizations that have strong data mastering initiatives. If your replicas contain sensitive data that you are tucking away in some generally unknown place, are you expanding the attack surface area for the organization? Are there governance or compliance regulations that your data may fall under?

Another reason is because “we’ve always done it this way.” The status quo of thinking about backup data as an insurance policy that is separate and unrelated to SaaS data ingestion for other scenarios, reaches back before the days of SaaS applications themselves – when data backup and ingestion were two separate motions done on the database level.

How we do things is just as important as doing them in the first place. And changing HOW we do things is hard. It starts with the realization that the status quo no longer applies. In this case, the realization that cloud applications allow for fundamentally different data consumption patterns – and that backup tools can be the perfect hat trick to take back ownership and control of your cloud application data, and to re-use backed up data for all other data consumption needs across our organizations.  

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