The software industry is facing its biggest challenge ever:
Untangle the millions of sloppily executed digital transformations, security, and cloud migrations that are hastily being forced through product roadmaps in order to combat COVID-19 related disruption.
It's now clear that COVID-19 is the most violent forcing function ever for overarching "business transformation", with the closest analogous event maybe being Y2K.
Recall Y2K - this used to refer to a widespread computer programming shortcut that was expected to cause extensive havoc as the year changed from 1999 to 2000. Instead of allowing four digits for the year, many computer programs only allowed two digits (e.g., 99 instead of 1999).
Think back to the pandamonium during the months leading up to Y2K. Remember how hard it was for financial, medical, education, and manufacturing firms to reconcile simple date formats during Y2K?
How then do we now expect these same industries, whom are still not known for their technology capabilities, to digitize their core systems more rapidly than ever without making an incredible mess of it?
Our theory is that in the years immediately following the "conclusion" of COVID-19, we'll see a massive new opportunity approach vector for software and services businesses to unsnarl the mess that we've made for ourselves.
Enter stage right: the newest generation of sophisticated infrastructure, analytics, and information security software solutions.
We believe that the 10 companies below are well-positioned to help avoid and fix the inevitable carnage:
1) Kount -
Kount’s Identity Trust Global Network delivers real-time fraud prevention and enables personalized customer experiences for more than 10,000 leading brands and payment providers. Linked by Kount’s award-winning AI, the Identity Trust Global Network analyzes signals from 32 billion annual interactions in order to customize user experiences across the spectrum of trust—from frictionless experiences to blocking fraud. Quick and accurate identity trust decisions deliver safe payments, account creation, and login events, while reducing digital fraud, chargebacks, false positives, and manual reviews.
2) ProfitWell -
For forward-thinking recurring revenue businesses who value growth, ProfitWell provides industry standard BI solutions that improve your retention and monetization automatically through unmatched subscription intelligence. ProfitWell serves over five thousand subscription companies, including B2B companies like Autodesk, Atlassian, and Zuora, and B2C darlings like Meetup, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Lyft.
3) Gainsight -
Gainsight’s innovative customer-centric technology is driving the future of customer success. The company’s Customer Cloud offers a powerful set of solutions focused on customer success, product experience, revenue optimization, customer experience, and customer data, that together enable businesses to put the customer at the center of everything they do.
4) Sumo Logic -
Sumo Logic is a secure, cloud-native, machine data analytics service, delivering real-time, continuous intelligence from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across the entire application lifecycle and stack. More than 2,000 customers around the globe rely on Sumo Logic for the analytics and insights to build, run, and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructures. With Sumo Logic, customers gain a multi-tenant, service-model advantage to accelerate their shift to continuous innovation, increasing competitive advantage, business value and growth.
5) Lucid -
Lucid is the parent company of two cloud-based visual productivity solutions: Lucidchart and Lucidpress. Lucidchart is a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation. Lucidpress is an intuitive brand templating platform that empowers anyone to easily create on-brand materials. Together, they are utilized in over 180 countries by more than 20 million users. Ninety-six percent of the Fortune 500 use Lucidchart, and customers include Google, GE, NBC Universal and Johnson & Johnson. Lucid’s partners include industry leaders such as Google, Atlassian, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, and Microsoft.
6) Domo, Inc. -
Domo’s mission is to be the operating system for business, creating a new relationship between your people, data and systems. By getting data into the hands of everyone across the organization, Domo helps you reimagine how business can be done, creating new business opportunities and a measurable competitive advantage. Domo works with many of the world’s leading and most progressive brands across multiple industries, and is led by a management team with tenure at the world’s most well-known technology companies.
7) Amplitude -
Amplitude is the leading product intelligence platform that helps companies use their customer data to build great product experiences for digital growth. Headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Singapore, Amplitude is the cross-platform, real-time data solution of choice for modern product and growth teams. Amplitude powers over 40,000 digital products at companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Adidas, CapitalOne, NBC, Hubspot, and Procter & Gamble.
8) DocuSign -
DocuSign helps organizations connect and automate how they prepare, sign, act on, and manage agreements. As part of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, DocuSign offers eSignature: the world's #1 way to sign electronically on practically any device, from almost anywhere, at any time. Today, hundreds of thousands of customers and hundreds of millions of users in over 180 countries use DocuSign to accelerate the process of doing business and simplify people's lives.
9) Snowflake -
Snowflake’s cloud data platform shatters the barriers that have prevented organizations of all sizes from unleashing the true value from their data. More than 2,000 customers deploy Snowflake to advance their businesses beyond what was once possible by deriving all the insights from all their data by all their business users. Snowflake equips organizations with a single, integrated platform that offers the only data warehouse built for the cloud; instant, secure and governed access to their entire network of data; and a core architecture to enable many types of data workloads, including a single platform for developing modern data applications. Snowflake: Data without limits. Find out more at Snowflake.com.
10) Toptal -
Toptal is a global network of the top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and over 40% year-over-year growth, Toptal is the largest fully distributed workforce in the world.