Altitude 2020 Recap: We Discovered a Whole Lot Last Week

Even though Altitude 2020 was a virtual event, it was also our largest to date—and it wasn’t even close.

This year, nearly 1000 attendees from around the world joined us for a week full of exciting community announcements, product releases, and interviews with some of the most influential leaders in the industry. IT leaders also discussed their challenges and wins around app visibility, mitigating security risks, and the future of the digital workplace.

If you weren’t able to join us last week, you missed quite a bit. Want a day-by-day breakdown of what went down? Check out these daily recaps. If not, we’ll go over some of the highlights here.

We announced BetterCloud Discover

Every product announcement is important, but this one was arguably the biggest one we’ve ever made.

Peter Bilali, Director of Product Strategy at BetterCloud, brought the proverbial heat on Day 2 of Altitude when he announced BetterCloud Discover. “With this launch, BetterCloud becomes the first all-in-one SaaSOps platform that can discover, manage, and secure all of your SaaS applications in one place,” Bilali added.

BetterCloud Discover addresses some of the biggest challenges that our customers face today, including:

• A lack of full visibility into your SaaS environment. 30% of spend on SaaS applications is wasted due to lack of use or redundant apps.
• Manual and time-consuming management of SaaS apps. 74% of IT professionals spend a full day per work week manually managing their SaaS environments.
• The ongoing challenge of mitigating security risks. More than 50% of data breaches are caused by a current employee or contractor.

Want to see BetterCloud Discover in action? Check out Bilali’s full product demo here.

The SaaSOps movement is real

Last year, we announced that SaaSOps is a thing. This time around, we explored just how much of a thing it has become in the 12 months since our CEO David Politis announced the first definition of SaaSOps.

Politis took attendees through several findings from our 2020 State of SaaSOps report. Here are just a few, but they’re all pretty striking:

• The average business uses 80 SaaS applications, but most organizations don’t know which apps are being used or who they’re being used by
• IT teams spend 20 hours per week on manual tasks to manage SaaS applications
• 50% of data breaches are caused by a current employee or contractor

What does this all add up to? I mentioned this in my Day 1 recap, but it’s clear that SaaSOps has quickly evolved from a thing into a really important thing.

As SaaS consumption and usage climb to all-time highs, more IT organizations than ever will soon face the unique challenges of managing and securing a cloud-based environment. To empower current and future SaaSOps pros, Politis announced two new programs:

• New investments in the BetterCloud Service Offering, including our Expert Advisory Group, Customer Engineering, and Training & Enablement.
• BetterCloud Product Certification. Now you can prove your mettle as a BetterCloud administrator with a new product certification course.

The BetterIT Community is now called the SaaSOps Community

There are a lot of online communities, especially for people in tech—and BetterIT is one of the most vibrant and welcoming examples that I’ve participated in.

But behind the scenes, a lot of folks have been working hard to make BetterIT even, um, better. And on the first day of Altitude 2020, community director Mike Stone announced that it was getting the overhaul that many of you have been asking for.

Speaking of that overhaul, this is where I should stop calling it BetterIT and start using its new name: The SaaSOps Community.

As Stone shared in his keynote session, BetterIT has a lot of incredibly valuable resources for SaaSOps pros, but they were previously scattered across several platforms. The new SaaSOps Community platform is a one-stop-shop for things like the Ideas Portal, the new community forum, and an up-to-date calendar of events.

But what about your previous contributions to the community? Don’t worry, Stone and his team did a lot of work to make sure all of your conversations were ported over to the new platform.

You all stepped up in a big way this year

A lot of things in tech have changed overnight, but none more literally than…everything that happened at the beginning of 2020.

It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a lot of IT innovation. Companies that never intended to embrace remote work suddenly had no choice. And during Altitude 2020, we learned that even companies like Zoom haven’t been immune to the unique challenges of this new normal.

Politis reflected on all of this during his keynote and one thing has become abundantly clear: The world found new ways to stay productive—and IT stepped up in a big way to make it happen.

Long gone are the days when IT queues were filled with tickets about AV hardware. SaaS adoption is at an all-time high, which means your expertise is more critical than it’s ever been. This is just one of the many reasons why you deserve to take a bow. And as someone who just recently joined the company, I’m excited to be a small part of the growing SaaSOps movement.

Want to read about each day of Altitude 2020? Kick back and dive into these daily recaps. More interested in watching the actual sessions? Check them all out here on demand.