Competitive Intelligence Just Got Easy: Thank You SaaS!

[kalie moore]

The concept of competitive intelligence has arguably been around for thousands of years. Sun Tzu’s Art of War, the often-quoted text by Competitive Intelligence bloggers, originated in 500 B.C. Since then, we’ve come along way.

Competitive Intelligence as we know it was kickstarted in the 1970’s and really began to flourish in the 1980’s. Then came the Internet, and everything changed. Information, once hard to come by, first became available, then became an avalanche.

More recently, we have seen the rise of Software as a Service, or SaaS, where the application is hosted by a vendor and the data may be accessed from anywhere. The first mention of SaaS was in an internal document in 2000, and by 2015 the size of the SaaS market is estimated to grow to more that $21 billion. The introduction of SaaS has changed the face of a lot of industries.

Companies no longer need expensive datacenters. Industrial designers do not need to purchase pricey new systems every few years – the application evolves continually on the back end.  Accounting, once a core in-house department of every business, is now outsourced to a dedicated provider for a monthly subscription fee. And SaaS has introduced new methods to gather and analyze competitive intelligence. Here’s how.

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