Over the last decade, Cactus has focused on one thing: delivering top-quality software that helps our customers run better businesses, build better products, and move faster with confidence.
10 years of acceleration
First came the cloud shift
Even before the pandemic, many organizations were already moving from locally deployed solutions to cloud platforms. This wasn’t just a hosting change, it was a change in operating model.
Standardization became a turning point. Tools like Terraform, Helm, and Kubernetes didn’t just improve deployments, they helped industrialize DevOps:
- Infrastructure became code and reproducible
- Environments became portable and consistent
- Delivery pipelines became more reliable and scalable
Then COVID accelerated everything
COVID didn’t create digitalization, but it massively compressed timelines. What many companies planned over years became urgent in weeks: remote work, digital customer journeys, automated operations, stronger resilience. The pandemic turned “digital transformation” from a roadmap into a necessity.
After that, the SaaS boom went mainstream
With cloud maturity and accelerated digitization, SaaS expanded rapidly and investment poured into tools that optimize every part of business operations: from invoicing to order processing, from security scanning to summarizing conversations in Teams, from analysis of legal documents to medical applications, from internal workflows to customer experience, everything became a product.
Businesses gained enormous capabilities fast, but also accumulated a complex landscape of subscriptions, integrations, and operational dependencies.
Already for the last two years, Generative AI has been a massive inflection point.
While it’s clearly transforming many industries, the impact is uneven and in many areas the ROI is still not fully proven. A lot of the companies building the core technology are still on the path to profitability, and for many adopters, “adding AI” hasn’t automatically translated into measurable outcomes. Financial teams want clear numbers, and in many cases they’re still waiting for convincing evidence at scale.
Where we’re seeing the first consistently successful attempts is often in the back office: areas like support, internal knowledge management, document workflows, reporting, and operational automation, places where efficiency gains are easier to measure and risk is easier to manage.
But perhaps unsurprisingly (or maybe very surprisingly), the place where the change has been most dramatic is the software industry itself.
Why? Because Generative AI operates directly on the medium we work with every day: language, logic, and code.
That makes it fundamentally different from many other AI applications. It doesn’t just “assist” a process around the edges, it accelerates the core activity. And the result is becoming obvious: this is an incredible tool that can multiply development speed by several factors, especially in the hands of experienced engineers who know what to build, how to validate it, and how to ship it responsibly.
What does this mean for SaaS?
This raises a real question: Will companies still need SaaS in the same way?
Some organizations may choose to build more internally, especially where workflows are unique or differentiating.
But building is only part of the story. Maintaining software over years, security, reliability, governance, evolving requirements, is where complexity lives.
So we see two possible futures:
- A major reduction in engineering headcount (because fewer people can do more), or
- A major expansion of software needs (because faster building increases ambition and competition)
At Cactus, we’re convinced it’s the latter.
Yes, there will be layoffs in parts of the market (and we already see them). But the bigger story is that generative AI lowers the barrier to building, so more problems become solvable, more ideas become feasible, and the pace of change increases.
How Cactus is responding
That’s why we want to be at the forefront of this shift.
In the coming months, we’re launching an AI Certification Program to ensure our engineers are enabled and empowered:
- To master the most effective AI tools available today
- To integrate AI across architectures and technologies
- To build software that is not only faster to deliver, but also more robust, secure, and maintainable
We see the future with optimism, even if market agitation creates uncertainty in the short term, because the long-term trajectory is clear: more software, more intelligence, more automation, and more opportunity for the teams that adapt and lead.
At Cactus, we’re ready for that future and excited to build it with our customers.
