In our last post, we talked about the emergence of the Cloud and we feel this is where the Cloud model went wrong.

As the Cloud grew, Cloud providers figured out a way to monetize open-source technologies by starting hosting them in the cloud. The challenge with this model is that open-source technology providers are left with all the hard work to build and maintain their projects but not with much benefits.

As a result, we are seeing another paradigm shift where open source innovators are taking their offering to the cloud and offering it directly to customers as a managed offering. This shift not only balances the equation for open-source technology providers but also benefits the end-customers.

Moreover, there are other benefits with this new shift like multi-cloud and getting offerings directly from the original authors. As an example, open-source inventors like Databricks or MongoDB offer a fully managed SaaS offering over multi-cloud for better flexibility, resiliency, compliance, cost-effectiveness.

It’s no surprise that there has been a sudden rise in SaaS providers from MongoDB to Redis Labs. Here is an interesting article from coss.media. As you can see there is a massive increase in #startups from 4 in 2018 to 27 in 2021 so far.

Do you folks agree? Do you think this trend is short-lived or here to stay in the longer term?

We would love to hear what you think.