The 2020 State of Application Assembly

In-house application builders are no longer taking months or even years to develop applications from scratch — instead they are increasingly using SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) products as “building blocks” to speed time-to-market.

According to the 2020 State of Application Building survey results, rather than build everything in-house, the majority of app builders now utilize best-in-class SaaS APIs and internal APIs. These APIs represent a set of tools that includes routines and adherence to protocols that create a path of communication between an app and the SaaS to enable unique features and functionalities.

As little as three years ago, whether to “Build vs. Buy” meant building entirely in-house. Companies have historically taken this approach because they believed they would have more control by building every aspect of the application themselves. But organizations found that control was not their problem — adaptability was. By attempting to craft every aspect of the software development process, they became unable to scale and ultimately unable to build an application that provided the highest level of security, convenience, and functionality for their users.

Companies use this approach to assemble the app in compartmentalized pieces that can be assembled rather than coded. Furthermore, some companies now deploy their entire application into a set of microservices, isolated, loosely-coupled units for assembly. Companies are able to integrate these SaaS components at a much lower cost, compared to building everything themselves. Computerworld estimated this to be about 15% in savings. Acumatica says it’s closer to 20%.

The benefits that leveraging SaaS offers are undeniable. And, in our 2020 State of Application Building survey, we uncovered additional insights behind where, when, and what SaaS services are used most frequently.

Key Takeaways

• We are seeing a small, but significant, percentage of product managers as well as the security team members creating apps amongst survey respondents and our customers.
• More than 75% of apps were built for external purposes.
• Regardless of the size of the company or the team, 51% of respondents were responsible for two to five applications and 28% were responsible for more than five.
• We found that they rely on SaaS for payments, messaging, data augmentation, or authentication, allowing them to focus their internal development efforts on their core product.