The Rise of SaaS, AI, and What Comes Next

The cloud and SaaS (software-as-a-service) are rising trends for many business and IT professionals—and it is something we saw play out last week at Microsoft Build, which took place May 21-23, 2024. I thought it might be worth looking at what came out of the event and the impact such technology is having on enterprises, especially considering this is happening alongside the rise of AI (artificial intelligence).

Let’s consider the rising trends of cloud and SaaS first. In the earliest days of computing, large mainframe systems acted as the central processor and networked terminals as the clients. Cloud computing is based on the notion that computing does not need to be on the customer’s premise, nor does it have to be in any particular location. There are three service models—SaaS, PaaS (platform-as-a-service), IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service)—and four deployment models: private cloud, community cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud.

Research from Canalys suggested the market for SaaS applications, excluding infrastructure software, will continue to grow from $215 billion in 2023 to $278 billion by the end of this year 2024. This represents a whopping 30% growth year-on-year. Now that we have a better understanding of the market, let’s look at the recent example from Microsoft Build.

The new Real-Time Intelligence within Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end SaaS solution that is developed to give businesses the ability to act on high volume, time-sensitive, and highly granular data. For those who may not know, Microsoft Fabric is a unified data platform for analytics.

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