Evaluating the Performance of SaaS Companies During COVID

Following companies has a huge advantage – you can actually see every company’s performance by tracking its stocks. As the below table depicts, a few companies like Shopify, RingCentral, Twilio and Docusign have had tremendous growth in the past 6 months. Why – because in one way or another they enable people with ease of access to either office or ecommerce. Let’s look at the highlights of each company’s performance.

Like any other company in the world, Salesforce too was hit by the effects of the pandemic with the stock price reaching an extreme low of $124.30 as on 16 Mar 2020, but there has been significant recovery and as you can see, the stock price has already grown 15%. Read more

Unlike other companies, the pandemic hasn’t affected ServiceNow much and in fact, they are one of the top performing companies surpassing Amazon and Microsoft. According to Forbes, the company closed 37 deals worth more than $1 million in net new annual contract value (ACV), up 48% year over year. Among these Q1 deals, it closed the second-largest new customer transaction in company history and the largest customer service deal in the APAC region. Eighteen of the top 20 deals included three or more products.

Similar to ServiceNow, Square’s stock has continuously been growing, thanks to three major areas: Payments, Cash App and Square Capital. Read more. undefined

Primarily enabling remote work, Atlassian’s stock price looks really good. The company now has more than 171,000 paying customers, and usually adds anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 new paying accounts each quarter. In addition, Atlassian has 150,000+ organizations on Starter licenses/subscriptions, representing a large pool of potential paying customers. Read more. undefined

At a whopping $863.56, Shopify is seeing a steady increase in the stock price as the mass audience slowly shifts towards ecommerce during the pandemic. The scenario is expected to continue post COVID too as the trend had already been in place even before lockdown was initiated and retailers prefer to have online presence despite availability of offline stores. Read More.

Easily recognizable as the parent company of GoTo suite of products, LogMeIn offers a suite of remote access and connectivity prouducts. But, with bulky user accounts and application download requirement, companies prefer going to Teams or meet by Microsoft and Google as they come with the business suite and easy to use.

Offering cloud telephony and other similar solutions, both RingCentral and Twilio have seen a sharp rise in the stock value as most teams have gone remote and connectivity tools have become essential for business continuity.

Eliminating the need for physical signatures, DocuSign has not disappointed ever since it went public two years ago. Adding to it, the work from home and need to keep business running has fueled DocuSign’s growth and increase in stock value.

With physical offices continuing to remain closed to prevent the spread of virus, it has led to companies purchasing identity management solutions as people continue to access secure portals while working from home. According to Gartner, the identity management industry alone is worth $16B and is growing at a rate of 13% YoY. Read more undefined

With a record 90 minutes of engagement by paid users every day (https://slackhq.com/intl-en-gb-work-is-fuelled-by-true-engagement), Slack is gearing towards accelerated growth as the number of paid users and organizations go up day by day. Of course, it goes without saying that the work from home model gave Slack’s revenue a huge boost.

Also coming under the category of software that enable remote work, Zoom has been on a roll ever since it went IPO. While most of us did not have any idea what Zoom was, it is not possible to not know Zoom now. From consulting with your doctor to kindergarten classes, it is being used everywhere.

In conclusion, companies providing tools that support work from home have grown tremendously. On the other hand, bigger companies like Zendesk have shown only a decent amount of growth which we think is because companies are working remote, it has become harder to implement newer tools in the system. A more obvious reason is the cost – companies are trying to cut down on costs as there is a huge dip in sales.