How Development Teams Purchase SaaS
Earlier this year, Okta teamed with SD Times to create a report revealing how organizations evaluate and purchase technology in 2023. Auth0 published the first edition of the report, How Development Teams Purchase SaaS, in October 2020. The report aimed to determine the extent of developers’ influence in shaping an organization's technology evaluation and purchasing process, and whether this influence on SaaS procurement could offer a competitive edge.
Over the past three years, companies have navigated myriad changes — the effects of the pandemic, the 2021 venture capital boom, macroeconomic challenges, and workforce reductions — all while striving to drive business growth and maintain operational efficiency.
Key takeaways of the 2023 report
With the 2023 edition of How Development Teams Purchase SaaS, Okta aimed to explore the potential impact of these external dynamics on the purchasing behaviors of development teams and understand the role the explosion of AI plays in the SaaS domain. To uncover the answers, we surveyed hundreds of developers, managers, and executives worldwide.
We discovered how organizations incorporate third-party SaaS components into their apps, who initiates procurement, and who’s involved with sourcing. We also looked at what types of SaaS components organizations use and why, hoping to see organizations benefit from doing so.
Here are our key takeaways.
- The use of third-party SaaS components is already high, and adoption is continuously increasing.
![Use of third-party SaaS components]()
- In the next 12 months, 97% of product engineering teams expect to use many third-party AI tools for various reasons.
![Engineering teams expect to use many third-party AI tools]()
- Increasing time savings and agility remains the most common motivation for using third-party SaaS components.
![Motivation for using third-party SaaS components]()
- Third-party authentication reduces time to market more than any other SaaS component.
![Third-party versus in-house SaaS time to market]()
- The importance of including application development team members in SaaS component decisions is increasing. Decision-making is a team effort, and respondents experience much higher job satisfaction in organizations that value their feedback during the SaaS purchase process.
![Importance of including application development team members in SaaS component decisions]()
These are just a few insights from the How Development Teams Purchase SaaS report. To read more, download the full report.
