Which cloud applications and SaaS offerings are most popular with business users? The fourth-annual Business @ Work report, from Okta, pinpoints the 15 most widely used SaaS and cloud applications. The annual report, slimmed down from last year's Top 25 list, is based on real-world monitoring and analytics data rather than customer surveys.
Here’s a look at this year’s Okta list (based on number of customers) vs. last year’s rankings, along with ChannelE2E’s channel-centric observations about each SaaS and cloud offering.
1. Microsoft Office 365 (Same rank as last year): Still growing and now a cash cow for the software-turned-cloud giant.
2. Salesforce (Same): The company's most interesting move involves small business editions of CRM and help desk cloud offerings, which launched in March 2018.
3. Amazon AWS (Up from 4 last year): We're set to update our list of the Top 50 MSPs for AWS in late 2018...
4. Google G Suite (Up from 5 last year): Google has made serious inroads with MSPs over the past year, and new security-centric services could continue to pull MSPs into the Google Cloud ecosystem.
5. Box (Down from 3 last year): Still a big name, especially thanks to growing channel relationships, according to Box CEO Aaron Levie.
6. Concur (Same): SAP launched a Concur partner program nearly two years ago. More recently, many of those Concur leaders have been pushing SAP's midmarket cloud partner efforts.
7. Slack (Up from 8 last year): In some cases, Slack is gaining integrations to MSP software...
8. JIRA (Down from 7 last year): Atlassian has been promoting more JIRA service desk partner integrations. Plus, Atlassian and incident management platform provider PagerDuty are working together to help IT teams and partners improve incident response.
9. DocuSign (Up from 12 last year): Within the IT channel, Ingram Micro Cloud expanded its distribution relationship with DocuSign in September 2017.
10. Cisco Systems Meraki (Up from 15 last year): The poster-child for cloud-enabled WiFi networking and management services.
Continue to page two for SaaS business applications ranked 11 through 15 as of early 2018.
Here are SaaS business applications ranked 11 through 15 as of early 2018.
11. Zendesk (Down from 9 last year): ManageEngine’s endpoint management application, Desktop Central, unveiled a Zendesk integration in November 2017.
12. Dropbox (Down from 11 last year): Despite the small slip in rankings, Dropbox continues to grow overall and the company launched a successful IPO in March 2018. Shares rose more than 30 percent on the first day of trading.
13. ADP (Down from 10 last year): Still a big name, and now backed by the recent WorkMarket acquisition to drive on-demand workforce management.
14. Atlassian Confluence (Same): Atlassian has made multiple moves in recent months, though we haven't seen Confluence updates.
15. ServiceNow (Up from 17 last year): The company is gaining momentum with midmarket MSPs. CareWorx, for one, has developed a multi-tenant version of ServiceNow for partners. Watch for more updates at the ServiceNow Knowledge 2018 conference in May 2018.
Among the additional findings from the Okta report: Google has been adding G Suite customers faster than Office 365 over the past 3 month time period, 6 month time period and even year-over-year. It appears G Suite’s renewed focus this year on the enterprise is paying off. G Suite grew its customer base 49% this past year, compared to Office 365, which grew its customer base 40%.
