Stocks to Watch

The advent of "Software-as-a-Service," or SaaS, was a true inflection point of the ongoing Internet Revolution.

Workers no longer had to rely on running a program they had to install on the machines on their desks in front of them. Rather, a specialist vendor would manage the software and simply allow all employees to access that software from a remote central location: "the cloud."

This changed everything. Companies no longer had to deal with the myriad small hassles of software; they could tighten up operations and focus on the mission, rather than managing growing IT departments.

For investors, the benefits were no less profound. Companies that offered SaaS, like Alphabet Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., became must-have shares that returned triple digits to shareholders who got in before SaaS took off.

According to a study done by Emergent Research, 80% of small businesses will be using the cloud by 2020 for much of their operations. For the top seven cloud companies, the cloud represents about $18 billion of business annually in 2015, according to the go-to news source for tech professionals, the CIO Journal. 

Global SaaS software revenue will reach more than $100 billion in 2016. According to Forbes, cloud-based service has a compounded annual growth rate of 24% through 2018. That's downright impressive growth given the soft nature of the global economy.