Last year we talked about how the industry was overinflated thanks to megarounds and unprecedented valuations, alluding to a future correction. That correction hit hard in 2022 and its ripple effects will continue to make waves through the entire tech ecosystem for the year to come. While the financial and growth dynamics for sustainable startups have dramatically shifted this past year and sales became harder as prospects cut budgets, the underlying behavior shifts in the enterprise driving the next wave of tech trends are as sticky as ever as they’ll help establish the survivors of the downturn.
As per tradition, here are the top enterprise tech predictions our Work-Bench team and portfolio see for the upcoming year:
On cybersecurity: Security leaders are caught between two major challenges. On one hand, companies continue to place greater focus on the performance of the CISO organization in light of the ever growing impact of cybersecurity threats. On the other hand, boards are demanding higher ROI with cut cybersecurity spending. In 2023, more and more CISOs will use automated performance management tools to rationalize their budget and consolidate measurements of their security program and achieve improved performance.
- Shirley Salzman, Co-Founder and CEO of SeeMetrics
On product-led growth (PLG): In response to the cooling technology market, software companies will need to prioritize go-to-market efficiency. This means vendors who have traditionally relied on direct, enterprise sales will invest in lower-touch, product-led growth approaches. Meanwhile, companies with existing product-led businesses will look to capture larger, stickier deals by moving upmarket into the enterprise. This requires the addition of high-touch sales motions on top of their PLG motion. In either case, sales, product, marketing, and growth teams will need to harmonize both PLG and direct sales motions into their overall go-to-market strategy in 2023.
- Justin Dignelli, Co-Founder and CEO of Pace
On real-time, multiplayer infrastructure tools: Given a lot of traditional web stacks aren't built to support the level of development and hosting that data-intensive applications require, companies have to hire their own team of dedicated developers to help build this tech in-house. Moving forward, platforms that enable developers to build sophisticated apps with features including multiplayer, optimistic updates and offline-mode to abstract away complexity from traditional application development will become more popular. This was a prominent benefit for Adobe’s $20B acquisition of Figma and what made Figma a game-changing product in the world of Canva, Adobe XD and Invision.
- Priyanka Somrah, Associate at Work-Bench
On SaaS pricing: Now that the “growth at all costs” era has come to an end, software companies need to show real revenue and profit growth. In order to do this, vendors need to price appropriately against the benefits their customers receive. In 2023, we’ll see a massive uptick of companies selling more efficiently (e.g. via self-serve), pricing closer on value, and shifting towards trends like “get started” buttons with "public pricing" popping up on vendor websites. This transparency will ensure customers that they aren’t overpaying relative to the value they truly unlock and make it easier for customers to get software budgets approved internally.
- Akash Khanolkar, Co-Founder and CEO of Octane
On DevOps: After a seemingly endless boom cycle where cloud budgets were an afterthought and adding headcount was the solution to all ills, teams are getting smaller, smarter, and faster. Various DevOps paradigms borrowed from FAANG have become table stakes for productive teams (Vulnerability Scanning, Internal Developer Platform, Ephemeral Environments, E2E testing before merge, Autoscaling/Scaling to Zero). Teams will cut back on internal DevOps projects and accelerate their adoption of external DevOps solutions to leverage these paradigms and recover developer cycles by refocusing on their core competencies and application.
- Benjie De Groot, Co-Founder and CEO of Shipyard
On cloud infrastructure: With the explosion of cloud infrastructure APIs, tools, and use cases, in 2023 teams will seek to better streamline their operations by consolidating their tools and implementing data integration best practices. This will enable them to store all of their data in a cost-effective manner and use the best available tools for analysis, querying and get rid of vertical niche solutions.
- Yevgeny Pats, Co-Founder and CEO of CloudQuery
Do you have any major tech predictions for 2023? Or are you building a product that is on the heels of any of the above trends? We’d love to hear from you.
