According to our Chief Technology Officer, Adrian Kunzle, there’s a price that must be paid with every new technology. “There is a honeymoon phase for every new technology, but once that’s over, we enter a stage of negotiation, ” Adrian explained during his recent South by Southwest (SXSW) session. “We come to know that there is a consequence for the convenience, for the connectivity. The infatuation with the shiny new toy wears off—and new apprehensions set in.”
We reach this impasse with all technology, Adrian noted in the session, “Why Data Is Critical to Your Company’s Success.” Everyone was amazed when the first mobile phones were released, for example, but now we continuously grapple with the implications from their use.
The adoption curve for SaaS technology is no different. Adrian argued that in 2024, we have definitively entered the stage of negotiation.
What made SaaS flourish in its early days—its availability, functionality, and ease of management—has now created equivalent concerns. Security, data access, and the proliferation of data being collected have all become greater worries in a landscape where SaaS software is ubiquitous. Today, the average organization uses more than 370 individual SaaS applications.
We’re at a tipping point, Adrian explained. Given this juncture, how can businesses get back to the original promise of SaaS software and data itself, to gain a competitive advantage that supports sustainable growth as well as innovation? Adrian outlined the answers in his talk. At the heart of the matter is every organization’s ability to access, activate, and gain meaningful insight from proprietary data.
Accessing your data
“Your competitive edge no longer comes from SaaS,” Adrian said. “Everybody is using those systems. What makes you fundamentally different as a company is the data you have in those SaaS systems.”
Extracting that data, however, isn’t always easy. In fact, SaaS applications have a vested interest in making access difficult. Keeping data under lock and key makes sense for the subscription model, where the goal is to keep customers coming back and buy more features. Otherwise, organizations can independently build what they need or outsource the work. “It’s hard to be good at a lot of things,” Adrian noted. SaaS applications might be great for infrastructure or office tooling, but that doesn’t necessarily make them the ideal vendor to build out your next internal app.
“The notion that something like Salesforce is selling you a competitive advantage is nonsense,” Adrian said. “It’s your data that’s in there. But here’s the problem: Can you access it?”
Extracting, backing up, securing, and centralizing SaaS data outside of SaaS applications isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s requisite for true differentiation and dominance in your field.
Activating your data
Today, most companies aren’t set up to learn from their data. They’re “data rich and insight poor,” as Adrian put it. There is a competitive advantage and the potential for profound innovation in your data—but not if you can’t access or activate it.
One aspect of effective activation is gaining a historical view of company data. SaaS products typically don’t accommodate this, because old data is often overwritten to minimize storage costs. Yet, when organizations have access to this history, it becomes possible to identify trends and opportunities.
Access to historical data logs opens up the possibility of solving business problems with your business data. Products like Own’s Discover are built not just to back up business data for recovery purposes but also to actuate data history, corral it into a data lakehouse, and allow users to bring in analytics tools to solve their most pressing queries. “No one knows what your business needs more than people at your business, which is why you need to own your data,” Adrian said.
The AI question
With wider access to generative AI, which can be prompted to create novel content, our lives have been forever changed. And so too have our business goals. Generative AI tools are being built and adopted ravenously, putting pressure on every business to craft models that suit their needs and—of course—lend them a competitive edge.
The AI arms race underscores the need to access SaaS business data. “AI has to be trained on something—and if you’re not training it on your own data, you’re not going to get the best results,” Adrian said.
Further, without eyes on your data and backup systems that track and flag changes, quality can be compromised. “We see 15% of our customers repairing data every month,” Adrian noted. “Our goal is not just to help our customers protect their data, but make it of higher quality on an ongoing basis because errors build up in data sets, and relying on users to spot them is dicey at best. If you’re doing smart backup, issues are easily spotted and corrected—less slips through the cracks.”
With AI, we’re on track to see just as many failures as big wins for organizations building their own generative models. When these systems are built on faulty data, their output will be similarly unsound, representing millions—even billions—of wasted dollars.
Democratize your data by owning it
Building AI isn’t the only reason to prioritize data ownership and quality. Every organization needs good data in front of the people making business decisions on a daily basis. It’s an aspect of data management that has all too frequently been overlooked.
“Using data isn’t just the domain of senior leadership,” Adrian said. “We need to make it easy for everyone across an organization to leverage the potential here so that anyone at any level can use data to discover how to work better. They needn’t wait for someone else to instruct them.”
In the process, employees across a variety of functions do more than create business value; they are empowered to solve more problems, act on insights, and innovate from the ground up. And that undoubtedly creates a competitive edge.
Owning, activating, and empowering more people with your SaaS data is easier than you think. Talk to an expert from Own to get started.
