I spent the better part of 2023 auditing software spend at a mid-sized manufacturing company in Ho Chi Minh City. The CFO proudly told me they'd cut costs by moving to cloud solutions. Then I opened their invoice folder. Fourteen different SaaS subscriptions. Only four were actually being used. The other ten? Forgotten, auto-renewing, one even dating back to 2019. They were throwing away $127,000 annually on software nobody touched.
This scene repeats itself thousands of times across enterprises worldwide. And yet, despite this chaos, SaaS has fundamentally changed how businesses operate—for better and worse.
The Scale Is Staggering (And Growing)
By 2024, the global SaaS market hit $262 billion. That's not a typo. For context, the entire Vietnamese software and IT services industry generates roughly $16-20 billion annually. We're talking about an industry ten times larger. And it's growing at about 12-13% per year, which means we'll likely see $400+ billion by 2030.
What's wild is how this breaks down by company size. According to a 2024 report from Blisspoint, the average enterprise now uses 254 SaaS applications. Not 25. Not 50. 254. I know CIOs who laughed when I told them this—until they actually counted.
The distribution is heavily skewed too. Your Finance team probably subscribes to 40+ tools. Engineering? 30+. Marketing? Sometimes more than both combined, because they operate like startups within the enterprise.
Where Enterprises Actually Struggle (And Why)
Here's what nobody talks about in those glossy SaaS marketing decks: integration debt is killing enterprise productivity.
I watched a team at a logistics company in Da Nang spend four weeks every month doing manual data entry between three different systems because their Zapier/Make.com setup kept breaking with API updates. Four weeks. Per month. For a company with 300 employees. Do the math on what that costs in developer time and human error.
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The ideal SaaS pitch is: "Replace your old, slow, on-premise system with our elegant cloud solution." The reality? You're now managing legacy systems AND new SaaS tools because rip-and-replace isn't actually possible when you have 15 years of business logic embedded in your ERP.
What enterprises don't realize is that vendor lock-in with SaaS isn't the same as with traditional software. With old perpetual licenses, you could at least run the software locally and maintain control. With SaaS, you're entirely dependent on the vendor's API stability, pricing decisions, and roadmap. I know a financial services company that got hit with a 300% price increase from their document management SaaS because they'd become too dependent on it. They had no leverage.
The Hidden Economics
This is where it gets interesting. SaaS is supposed to be cheaper because you're paying for shared infrastructure. And in greenfield scenarios? True. But enterprises don't operate in greenfield scenarios.
The total cost of ownership for a typical SaaS implementation includes:
Software licensing (usually 20-30% of total cost)
Integration and implementation (often 40-60%)
Training and change management (10-20%)
Ongoing support and customization (10-30%)
Data migration (often wildly underestimated)
A mid-market company might pay $100,000 for Salesforce licenses and think that's the budget. The actual cost to meaningfully deploy it? $600,000-$1.2 million over 18 months. Guess how many projects I've seen blow past budget by 2-3x?
What Enterprise SaaS Actually Does Well
Despite my complaints, let me be clear: SaaS solved real problems that on-premise software never could.
Scalability without infrastructure capital is genuinely powerful. A company growing from 100 to 1,000 employees doesn't need to hire infrastructure teams anymore. That's not marketing speak—that's operational reality.
Update cycles changed everything. Remember waiting 18 months for a new feature in enterprise software? SaaS vendors can push features every sprint. Tools like Slack, Figma, and even Asana evolved so fast partly because they could.
And here's something that doesn't get enough credit: network effects in SaaS are real and powerful. Slack is valuable because everyone you work with is on Slack. That wasn't true for email systems in 1998, but email achieved the same effect. The ability to collaborate across company boundaries without VPNs and enterprise IT approvals changed organizational structure itself.
The Vietnam Angle
Vietnamese enterprises are in an interesting position. They're often 10-15 years behind Western adoption curves but moving fast. I've seen companies jump from legacy systems directly to modern SaaS stacks—skipping the painful transition many Western enterprises are stuck in.
The challenge? Many SaaS platforms were built for Western workflows. When a Vietnamese manufacturing company tries to use a Western HR SaaS tool, it doesn't understand statutory requirements for employee contracts under Vietnamese labor law. Same with accounting—every country has different tax reporting. You end up with tools that solve 70-80% of your problem, then need custom development anyway.
What To Actually Watch Out For
If I could give enterprises one piece of advice: before adopting SaaS, audit your existing data and integration debt. You can't solve organizational problems with new software.
Also, read the SLA carefully. Not the marketing material—the actual Service Level Agreement. That 99.9% uptime guarantee? Most SaaS vendors exclude planned maintenance, doesn't include their integrations, and has clauses that make it nearly impossible to claim. I've seen incident response times of 6 hours for "critical" issues.
And please, for the love of all that's holy, stop letting every department independently buy their own SaaS stack. Shadow IT is real, it's expensive, and it creates security nightmares. Though I will say, trying to control it through enterprise procurement is equally frustrating—I've watched SaaS requests take 4 months to approve while people just used free accounts instead.
The Future
The SaaS landscape is consolidating. Best-of-breed is losing to integrated platforms because enterprises are tired of managing 254 tools. That's why we're seeing players like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Microsoft expand horizontally rather than just go deeper in their core.
Vertical SaaS—tools built specifically for an industry—will keep growing. The one-size-fits-all days are ending.
And as enterprises navigate this complexity, platforms like Idflow Technology that help streamline these integrations and manage SaaS ecosystems more coherently become increasingly valuable. Because honestly, someone needs to help enterprises stop drowning in their own tool stack.
