Okta's recently released Business at Work report highlighted several fascinating trends around SaaS app usage across their 4k customer base. These are the things we found most interesting:

SMBs use more apps than Enterprise

Company size isn't a limiting factor when it comes to number of apps deployed; most businesses use between 11 - 16 off the shelf cloud apps. Interestingly, employees at small to mid-size companies have access to a median of 16 apps while enterprise employees can only access a median of 11 apps. From a regional perspective, Europe, with a median of 12 apps per company lags the US and APAC with a median of 15 each.

Office 365 is most prevalent

Salesforce has been firmly ensconced at the top of the table since 2012 but has been recently dislodged by Office 365. From a category perspective, of the top 10 apps, 3 can be classed as Productivity (Office 365, Google Apps, Docusign), 2 are Collaboration (Box, Dropbox), 2 are HCM (Concur, Workday), and 1 each in Sales (Salesforce), Customer Support (Zendesk) and Engineering (AWS).

Unsurprisingly, Slack was the fastest growing app during Q2 '15 - growing 50% during the period.

Mobile continues to grow in importance

Globally, APAC leads the way with almost a quarter of end users logging in via mobile. US and Europe lag slightly with 16% and 12% respectively with the disparity in Europe being attributed to data privacy regulations and more limited personal device usage. Regardless of the European figure, the trend appears to be set and SaaS app usage will follow the consumer trend whereby the mobile internet has overtaken the "desktop internet" in importance. It will be interesting to monitor the evolution of this trend particularly with regard to app deployment to front-line staff and whether mobile emerges as a key customer acquisition channel.

Data breaches place increased focus on security

With a 46% increase in data breaches YoY, buyers are increasingly focused on app security. Adoption of multi-factor authentication (MFA), like SMS, has increased 40% in 2015 with the old-school security question declining in popularity. Unsurprisingly, MFA is most prevalent in the Legal, Internet and Finance sectors.

Category creation is key

In conclusion, as Tom Tunguz presciently highlighted, the consistent volume of apps across SMB and Enterprise brings into focus the importance of category creation for SaaS companies, developing apps for newer processes versus trying to replace incumbents in traditional categories. While the continued emergence of mobile as an engagement channel opens new opportunities both from a solution design and customer acquisition perspective.