Okta: Best-of-Breed Apps Are Still Winning

https://www.worketc.com/blog/growing-businesses/best-of-breed-or-crm-ecosystem-the-best-choice-to-grow-your-business/

A question a lot of us are thinking on these days is … is “the suite” back?  If you talk to leaders from Hubspot to Datadog to next-gen ones like Salesloft and more, you’ll hear one thing … and see it in the numbers.  Buyers want to buy more from vendors they trust.  Its one vendor to qualify.  Its own dataset.  The integrations are simpler, or nonexistant, if you buy more than 1 product from a single SaaS company.

And the numbers support this.  Box’s growth has been fueled by offering multiple products. Datadog has been on an unprecedented tear as its expanded its footprint.  As with Atlassian.

And yet, Suites can rise even as single solution vendors can as well.  The Cloud is just so huge.

And the latest data from Okta supports this.  While this chart is a bit confusing at first glance, what you can see is that even as “Suites” from Microsoft and others have grown, penetration of Zoom, Slack, Smartsheet and more have grown even faster in terms of deployment:

Put differently, “81% of organizations are supplementing their Microsoft 365 suite with one or more best-of-breed tools. Nearly 10% of customers are deploying six or more”.

So it seems even as the Suite rises, even as we indeed buy more from Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and more … that means we buy even more from top single-point solutions to augment those suites and platforms.

Good news indeed.  Suites + Best-of-Breed aren’t an Either/Or.  Rather, they build on each other, leading to a win-win in many cases.