The Covid boost we’ve seen has been huge in SaaS and Cloud, but it hasn’t always been even, especially for folks that aren’t #1 in their space.
Actually, some of the best data come from Adobe and Adobe Sign here (surprising for a public company):
Adobe Sign is the clear #2 in the e-signature market, but it’s not #1. Did all the benefits go to #1? No. In fact, Adobe Sign now is the fastest-growing product in terms of new bookings at Adobe, and grew at a stunning 100%+ during the peak of Covid, and still an elevated 70%-80% year-over-year after:
“60 percent of consumers signed more digital documents in the past six months than the previous six, and Adobe Sign witnessed triple-digit year-over-year growth in users each month from June through September 2020.”
Similarly, DropBox reported big gains from HelloSign, the player it acquired.
So everyone benefits from Covid in the e-signature space.
Now, Okta provides different data for web conferencing. Here, it seems like Zoom really ran away with it:
According to Okta data, “While Zoom had more customers than Webex as of February 2018, Zoom had less active unique users than Webex until March 2020, at which point Zoom’s unique user growth rapidly passed Webex and remained higher.” So Zoom was already pulling away from the pack before Covid as we knew, and can see above. But the others really didn’t get the Covid boost Zoom did. They saw some boost. You can see above that Webex and RingCentral did grow faster after Covid hit. But the boost compared to Zoom was quite modest.
[And note this is Okta data, so it’s very enterprise. Folks like Whereby that focus on SMBs mainly grew a stunning 5x in 2020, and I am sure Google Hangouts (or whatever it is called now) grew like a weed on the consumer/SMB side.]
Sometimes it may not matter. While Shopify in some ways pulled even further away from the pack, and grew faster than the much-smaller BigCommerce post-Covid, Big Commerce still benefitted nevertheless, even if it did not gain market share. It’s a $5B market cap company today!
Perhaps what we simply saw was that Covid enhanced the trends that were already in effect.
