SaaS: Top 5 companies in the industry

15/07/2020
Diego Gutiérrez
SaaS: Top 5 companies in the industry

The SaaS market is still a young market in which many companies are starting and growing very fast. But from its beginnings until today, there are companies that have made a difference with respect to their competitors. Baker Tilly wanted to analyse what these companies are and how they act to maintain their leadership in the SaaS sector.

But before we look at the three leading companies in the sector, let's explain what SaaS is. The Software as a service is dedicated to hosting, maintaining and supporting the software requirements of third party providers, with lower upfront costs and eliminates the need for organisations to install and run applications in their own environment or data centres.

Let us now look at the top 5 companies in the sector, starting with the two leaders, Microsoft and Salesforce and ending with SAP, Oracle and Adobe.

Leading companies in the SaaS sector

Microsoft and Salesforce in the SaaS market

The well-known Microsoft, a company that keeps reinventing itself every year, has seen its profits grow from almost zero to some $20 billion during the 10 years it has been in the industry. Microsoft Azurewhich is the name of the SaaS part of the company, is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft to build, test, deploy and manage applications and services using its data centres. This company accounts for just over 15% of the total SaaS market, giving it the top spot on the list.

It is closely followed by Salesforce, which accounts for approximately 13% of the SaaS market. The on-demand software it provides and its dominance in the CRM segment (Customer Relationship Management) establishes it as the second in this list, despite having lower growth compared to other segments of the sector.

SAP, Oracle and Adobe

On the other hand, SAP, Oracle and Adobe have to be highlighted to finish with the leadership of the sector. These three companies, with SAP at the forefront of growth, together account for around 22%. Together with Microsoft and Salesforce, they thus account for just over half of the market.

In conclusion, the importance of these 5 companies during the first years of SaaS should be highlighted, but it should not be forgotten that as this sector is still growing, new companies such as Workday, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Atlassian, Splunk, Cloudera, Carbonite and Tableau push the market even further upwards, and may pose some threat to the SaaS leaders.

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