☁️Top Trends that Transform the Cloud 📈

This is the Cloudly Update. Helping you stay above the Clouds.

Today we bring you:

• Forrester’s Top Trends for Transforming the Cloud

• Figma will remain freemium

• Datadog’s new Certification Program

• ServiceNow to Acquire Observability Innovator Era Software

• SaaS getting more expensive in 2023

• Atlassian product updates

Forrester’s Top Trends for Transforming the Cloud

A recent report by Forrester states how the cloud's evolution is leveraging its potential. Cloud strategies must be refined with the acceleration of cloud-native adoption.

• Hyperscalers answer customer demands platform composability.

• FinOps pressures ITFM/TBM to adapt and modernize.

• Platform teams power cloud-native transformation.

• Geopolitical dynamics create local players and solutions.

• Cloud redefines the enterprise data center.

• Kubernetes adoption drives proactive governance, compliance, and resilience.

• Cloud-scale operations solutions gain momentum.

• Mega vendors own enterprise IT budgets.

• The battle at the edge heats up.

• Industry-specific offerings gain traction.

Mega vendor Sway

Organizations are becoming wary of being overly dependent and moving towards multi-cloud. Workloads are different in some cases, mitigating the risk of having all operations to one vendor.

Geopolitical Dynamics

Data sovereignty has led to pronounced geopolitical influence. The pandemic has led to diversified supply chains and national and regional zone trends.

Read more at: Link

Figma will remain freemium

Adobe’s $20 billion plan to acquire startup rival Figma Inc.- the largest takeover of a private software maker- was announced earlier this month.

Following the planned deal, Adobe has stated that the plan is to keep Figma’s basic tier accessible without cost and remains “freemium.”

Adobe’s XD program, which competes with Figma, will be re-evaluated.

FigJam whiteboarding and presentation capabilities may be integrated into Adobe Express and Acrobat.

As new media-editing features, a massive library of fonts and stock images will make working in Figma more efficient.

Many of Figma’s loyal users reacted negatively, fearing that Adobe would make the smaller rival less accessible and innovative. Wall Street has criticized the deal as too expensive. Only the future will tell.

Read more at: Link.

Datadog’s new Certification Program

Datadog, the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, announced the launch of its Certification Programs.

• Datadog Fundamentals – Exhibit a working knowledge of products and common use cases.

• Log Management Fundamentals - Tests users' functional knowledge of log collection.

• APM & Distributed Tracing Fundamentals - Tracing architectures, their ability to instrument applications manually.

Read more at: Link.

ServiceNow to Acquire Observability Innovator Era Software

ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company, has signed an agreement to acquire observability and log management innovator, Era Software.

With IDC forecasting the growth of the observability market to reach $9.08 billion by 2025, this announcement underscores ServiceNow’s organic growth strategy with a focus on talent and technologies that strengthen the Now Platform.

Observability is foundational to digital transformation as it provides developers with the necessary insights to understand the performance of strategic applications at scale, and how to translate that data into business value.

Era Software’s innovative technology and customer‑centric approach to log management complements and augments existing features within Lightstep, (ServiceNow Acquisition in 2021) and accelerates ServiceNow’s path toward unified telemetry (logs, metrics, traces).

The expected completion of the acquisition is in Q4 2022. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Other recent ServiceNow acquisition

• Hitch Works

• DotWalk

• Mapwize

• Gekkobrain

Read more at: Link.

SaaS getting more expensive in 2023

SaaStr has looked into SaaS prices and found strong indications of price hikes.

HubSpot, very astute in holding the line on pricing and ACVs, raised prices by 12% for the first time since 2018 on new customers.

Slack has transformed from a channel-based messaging app to a digital HQ and did its first pricing increase in history recently of about 10%

Webflow is increasing its basic pricing by 16.5%, and other plans 8-43% (!

LinkedIn Survey done ju SaaStr of price increases

• “Yes” 54%

• “Looking into it” 24 %

• “Probably not” 22%

Many companies find that raising prices boosts MRR and ACV, but doesn’t really change anything in new customer growth.

Atlassian product updates

Atlassian, a collaboration and application development software provider, announced a series of critical updates to combat SaaS application sprawl at its first-ever Work Life event.

Atlas

• A new teamwork directory service

• Available next month

• Will enable the use of Jira Cloud to view the current status with the most recent updates

• Goal scoring capability to assign a projected score that a team will meet by the specified deadline

Unified Admin Experience

• Integrating users across the cloud product portfolio

• Streamlining admin processes to remove redundant steps

• Simplifying audits

• Compliance checks

• Security reviews

Together

• New subscription bundle

• Combines Trello, Confluence, Jira Work Management, and Atlas

• The price tag of $11 per month per user for enterprises with more than 5,000 staff

Smart Links

• Ability to bring info and documents from myriad sources into Atlassian’s apps

• Available in Confluence, Google Docs, Figma, and Trello

Read more at: Link.