The promise of SaaS has led to an ever-expanding sea of applications—and the enterprise is drowning
Organizations are already as much as 24% over budget on cloud spend, with a projected increase of 39% into 2022. To make matters worse, as much as 29% of SaaS spend often goes underutilized. Wasteful spending means less budget available for more-meaningful projects and calls into question your overall ROI. As organizations continue to invest heavily in their tech estate, executives are increasingly being challenged to prove the SaaS products they’re investing in are valuable.
Research suggests that investing in cloud-first strategies such as automation can reduce backend maintenance and are 70% more likely to provide ROI. Automation by way of innovations such as low-code will be adopted by 75% of businesses in the near future. Low-code platforms give organizations opportunities to drive ROI by putting the power to manage complex technical processes across their software tools into the hands of any business user, not just experienced engineers. Here are three ways in which organizations can intelligently implement automation and low-code:
1) Address ROI issues with low-code
Gartner’s most recent CMO spend survey reveals a drastic decline in marketing budgets to 6.4% of overall company revenue in 2021, down from 11% in 2020, highlighting marketing as just one of many areas where companies are zeroing in on the demand for ROI clarity.
To ensure they drive ROI from costly technology purchases, businesses can utilize low-code platforms to take full control of their data and orchestrate automated processes. With low code, citizen developers and technical users alike can close technical gaps across their software tools, integrating their applications and even building out low-code automation from a single platform. As a result, teams can eliminate the need to purchase multiple software and vendor platforms, instead creating a composable infrastructure that can adapt to rapid business changes without having to rewrite code or purchase even more point solutions. According to Gartner, organizations that adopt the “composable enterprise” (an operational model that treats technical functionality as a series of interchangeable organizational blocks built to establish resiliency and keep up with the pace of business change) will be the most successful going forward.
Additionally, by putting automation into the hands of line-of-business workers and migrating digital projects out of the IT department, organizations not only drive more ROI from existing technology investments, but also conserve valuable technical resources and enable IT teams to focus on more-strategic initiatives, such as digital transformation.
2) Utilize the full potential of SaaS apps
Teams usually compensate for gaps across their SaaS tools by assigning team members hours of manual stopgap work, a poor use of any team’s time that can also frequently lead to employee burnout. Companies also often stretch their budgets and spend more on additional technical solutions to fill the gaps within their tech stacks—a temporary fix that usually adds to overall technical debt in the long term.
Low-code provides companies with more-sustainable ways to invest in SaaS by aligning workflows and processes cross-departmentally and creating a more-unified enterprise. Companies can use low-code to minimize software sprawl by maximizing the functionality of their existing tools and using low-code tooling to build out additional integration and automation functionality themselves. As a result, organizations make the most of their existing tech stack while avoiding the “SaaS bloat” that comes from endlessly purchasing new solutions.
3) Create a connected SaaS ecosystem to drives business innovation and competitive advantage
Business users tend to become experts on the limitations of their own tools. When they combine their expertise with the power and flexibility of low code, they can usually determine the most direct approach to solving their business challenges. With low code, business users can actively participate in their own implementations, scoping, testing, and iterating, making low-code processes more accessible to a larger audience. As a result, low-code paves another path to innovation as more users can join in on building, and improving, their own low-code integrations and automated workflows (and those of their colleagues).By giving anyone the power to address their technical challenges themselves, organizations resolve technical challenges faster, increasing productivity and adaptability.
Because low-code democratizes technical innovation, it also has a tendency to empower organizations to move faster and deliver true competitive advantage in the marketplace faster, edging out competitors and pleasing increasingly impatient customers.
Predictions suggest that non-technical professionals will build up to 80% of tech products and services by 2024. Low-code platforms are helping organizations meet new demands to improve business operations and drive business strategy—all while lowering risks and costs and freeing valuable IT resources. Companies that embrace low-code platforms can pave a new path to innovation and ROI for their tech estate by enabling citizen automators to get involved in building their own integrations and automated processes—the sooner, the better.
About the Author
Rich Waldron is CEO of Tray.io. Tray.io is ushering in the era of the automated organization. We believe that any organization can and should automate. With Tray.io, citizen automators throughout organizations can easily automate complex processes through a powerful, flexible platform, and can connect their entire cloud stack thanks to APIs. Today businesses such as Segment, Udemy, FICO, and New Relic rely on Tray.io to connect and automate data flow between the tools they use every day. With Tray.io’s visual workflow builder our customers create automated workflows to drive their business processes and do more, faster. We’re building a cutting-edge product that is powerful and complete while also being beautiful and easy to use.
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