How SaaS, serverless, and open source accelerate business development

The benefits of serverless and SaaS specifically are the result of competition among major CSPs to offer more—and more-compatible—applications of the best tech platforms “as a service.” This trend underscores the value of cloud as an enabler and driver of innovation, rather than just as a way to optimize IT costs. Recent McKinsey research, in fact, has shown that as much as 75 percent of the more than $1 trillion of value at stake in cloud comes from business innovation rather than from managing IT costs.

• Reduced initial investment outlay. Moving existing software to the cloud requires investments, especially in automation and often to a lesser extent in development and licensing. As companies “move up the stack” (in other words, consume more generalized services), they can increasingly take advantage of CSP offerings. For companies looking to set up quickly, build functionality efficiently, and test the market cheaply, serverless is an attractive option.
• Elimination of infrastructure management. Serverless requires zero infrastructure management (and hence no operational overhead) and significantly eases support for version upgrades. This frees product teams from hard dependencies on infrastructure provisioning, allowing businesses to shift resources to building products and services that directly generate value. Developers can take advantage of the fact that serverless architecture simplifies access to software functions as a service, reducing effort wasted on creating solutions that already exist. These functions can be flexibly recombined. With the right tooling and approach, many common application components can be standardized, audited, and easily reused, massively improving tech teams’ productivity. That can allow a company to quickly and easily test new-business functions with customers and adapt them as needed.
• Code brought “closer to the business.” Using SaaS and serverless to free IT from infrastructure management greatly reduces the complexity of app development and deployment. This, in turn, allows tech teams to organize around products—for example, “cards” or “loans”—which brings code “closer to the business.” As part of a commitment to agile and product-driven engineering, this approach makes it much easier for business leaders, product owners, and analysts to understand solutions and work with engineers in cross-functional teams.