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SaaS Companies Take Unusual Step to Prove AI Has Not Mortally Wounded Them

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According to Bloomberg, as a kind of life proof exercise, a bunch of private software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies have recently posted their earnings, even though it’s not strictly required. You won’t be shocked to read this is, Bloomberg says, “an attempt to convince lenders of their resilience to disruption from artificial intelligence.”

The SaaS world is in a tough spot right now as Wall Street looks into its crystal ball to see a near future where many of the dull computer programs people use at work will be replaced by vibe-coding. The story around this is that highly indebted software companies will soon not have enough cash to service their debt – bad for the companies, and bad for the companies they have borrowed from.

The broader phenomenon surrounding this is known as the SaaSpocalypse, and it began when approximately $300 billion worth of business software company value vanished from the universe earlier this month. According to the New York Times, companies affected by high-profile selloffs during January and February include LegalZoom, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Salesforce, Adobe, and Figma.

So Bloomberg noticed on Tuesday that McAfee announced earnings that were about the same as last year — meaning, perhaps, it’s not going to miss any loan payments. Bloomberg says the “IT modernization” company called Rocket Software saw a 5.2% increase over the past year. Perforce Software’s earnings were down a bit – $644 million compared to $654 million last year – but in a recent call to investors Perforce Software leaders revealed they would soon grow revenue “by embedding AI in products.”

Cloudera, an analytics company that Bloomberg described as “unusually private about its financials,” is boasting “growth of more than 50% year-over-year” in a statement on its website. That statement also claimed, “Cloudera’s momentum is driven by its unique position as the only data and AI platform vendor that supports deployments anywhere with a unified experience.”

As Harvard Business Review reported in 2022, SaaS companies are considered money-printing machines because they are on a monthly subscription model, like Netflix, but boring. The sudden frenzy over agentic tools like OpenClaw seems to have conjured up a vivid mental image: millions of IT workers around the world smashing the “unsubscribe” button en masse. These SaaS companies themselves, to a large extent, are demonstrating that the nightmare that many are imagining has not actually come true.

Gizmodo contacted McAfee, Rocket Software, Perforce, and Cloudera for comment, and will update if we hear back.





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