It’s important to remember, however, that there is much more to cloud computing than simply storage, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service, and more. This provides investors with a multitude of ways to profit from the accelerating move to the cloud.

With a large and growing list of cloud-native products and services, investors are looking for the best ways to capitalize on this opportunity and ride the increasing wave of cloud adoption. These three companies offer investors clear and ongoing opportunities to profit from the trend.

1. HubSpot: Rapidly expanding its suite of services
While it began life as an inbound marketing specialist, HubSpot (NYSE:HUBS) has quickly evolved and expanded its aspirations to become a one-stop-shop for customer relationship management (CRM).

The company has copied liberally from the successful template employed by salesforce.com, increasing its functionality with a series of successful, snap-on acquisitions. In fact, HubSpot has made five multi-billion-dollar acquisitions — as well as a multitude of smaller ones — over the past five years alone.

As a result of this platform expansion, HubSpot now provides marketing, sales, and service support, as well as content management and operations products. Each new offering has resulted in a growing market opportunity, with some estimates placing HubSpot’s total addressable market at about $20 billion. The company currently has roughly 114,000 customers, which pales in comparison to its total addressable market of more than 3 million small- and medium-sized businesses with a website.

The proof is in the pudding. During the first quarter, HubSpot delivered revenue that grew 41% year over year. Subscription revenue also climbed 41%, while professional services revenue jumped 43%. Additionally, the company’s total customer count grew by 45% and spending per customer was on par with the prior-year quarter.

These results aren’t a one-time thing, either. Since late 2014, HubSpot’s revenue has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 41%, while its international revenue has grown at 58%. At the same time, its margins have continued to expand and its free cash flow has rocketed higher.

2. NVIDIA: Providing the processing power that unpins cloud computing
While investors might not immediately think of NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) when considering cloud computing investments, its cutting-edge processors have become the industry standard for powering cloud computing and data center operations.

The same graphics processing units (GPUs) that render lifelike images in video games also underpin the unique challenges presented by cloud computing. The secret is the parallel processing, or the ability to conduct a multitude of complicated mathematical calculations simultaneously, thereby reducing the amount of time necessary to complete complex tasks and speeding up the most complex algorithms.

Each of the world’s largest cloud providers depends on NVIDIA state-of-the-art processors to power their systems. Its customer list reads like a Who’s-Who of cloud providers. They include Amazon’s AWS, Alphabet’s Google Cloud, International Business Machines’ IBM Cloud, Microsoft’s Azure, and Alibaba Cloud, just to name a few.

Yet NVIDIA has just begun to tap this massive opportunity, as evidenced by its most recent results. In the first quarter, data center revenue — which includes cloud computing, data center, and artificial intelligence applications — grew 79% year over year, accounting for 36% of NVIDIA’s total sales. At the same time, its gaming segment, which represents the lion’s share of its revenue, grew 106%. Total revenue grew 84%, a remarkable feat for a company with a market cap of $436 billion — and this could be just the beginning.

NVIDIA generated revenue of $16.68 billion in 2020, which pales in comparison to the company’s total addressable market, which management estimates will reach $250 billion over the next few years.

3. DocuSign: Digital signatures are just the beginning
Many investors are familiar with DocuSign (NASDAQ:DOCU), which provides cloud-based tools to sign documents. The company is the undisputed leader in the electronic signature space, with a whopping 70% share of a market that continues to grow. What investors may not know is that e-signatures are just the beginning of a large and growing opportunity for DocuSign, a fact that CEO Dan Springer is quick to point out.

“Typically, e-signature is the first step that many customers take on their broader digital transformation journey with us,” said CEO Dan Springer on a recent earnings call. “So from a financial point of view, we believe this surge in e-signature adoption bodes well for future Agreement Cloud expansion.”

The Agreement Cloud is the next step in DocuSign’s evolution, providing a dozen software applications and more than 350 integrations designed to manage the entire lifecycle of contracts and agreements. For example, once a contract is signed, the system can trigger the creation of a bill. An agreement up for renewal? A reminder is generated. There are hundreds of similar use cases including employee on-boarding, non-disclosure agreements, change orders, new customer forms, vendor/supplier agreements, and much more.

The strategy is not only working, but the business is on fire. For DocuSign’s fiscal 2022 first quarter (ended April 30, 2021), revenue grew 58% year over year, accelerating from 39% growth in the prior-year quarter. Perhaps more importantly, subscription revenue grew at an even faster pace, up 61%. At the same time, billings — a sales growth metric that factors in changes in deferred subscription revenue — climbed 54%. Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) more than tripled.

DocuSign generated total revenue of $1.5 billion last year, but its remaining opportunity is vast. With the addition of the Agreement Cloud, DocuSign management estimates that its total addressable market has doubled to more than $50 billion, leaving a long runway for growth.

You get what you pay for
Each of these stocks has vastly outperformed the market over the past year, with no signs of slowing. Bears will be quick to point out that these stocks are by no means cheap when measured using traditional valuation metrics. HubSpot, NVIDIA, and DocuSign are currently selling for 23, 19, and 18 times sales, respectively — when a good price-to-sales ratio for a stock is generally between one and two.

That said, each of these cloud-native companies has a strong position within its industry and is riding the secular tailwind of cloud adoption to new heights. As a result, investors have thus far been willing to pay up for the impressive topline growth and the promise of explosive profits that each represents.

Should you invest $1,000 in NVIDIA Corporation right now?
Before you consider NVIDIA Corporation, you’ll want to hear this.

Our award-winning analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now… and NVIDIA Corporation wasn’t one of them.

What Is IT Ticketing System Software?

IT ticketing system software — also called help desk or service desk software — provides a structured way to capture, track, prioritise, route and resolve requests and incidents raised by end users or automated monitoring tools. In a DevOps context these platforms sit at the intersection of IT service management (ITSM), incident response and customer support, feeding data into post-mortems, SLO reporting and continuous-improvement workflows.

Core capabilities typically include:

• Centralised ticket inbox with assignment and escalation rules
• SLA tracking and breach alerting
• Knowledge-base integration for self-service deflection
• Reporting and analytics dashboards
• Integration with monitoring, chat and CI/CD toolchains
• Automation rules for routine tasks (auto-assignment, canned responses, etc.)

Market Segmentation at a Glance

Third-party research covering the 2020–2026 period segments the global IT ticketing software market along three main dimensions: deployment model, support channel and geography.

Deployment Models

SaaS adoption has accelerated markedly since 2020, driven by remote-work expansion and tighter IT budgets. On-premise deployments remain relevant in financial services, government and healthcare where data-residency rules apply.

Support Channels (Application Segments)

Modern platforms aggregate tickets from multiple inbound channels into a single queue:

• Email — still the highest-volume channel for most enterprise IT teams
• Web forms — structured intake that enforces required fields before ticket creation
• Live chat — real-time support with optional bot-first triage
• Telephony — CTI integration for call-centre and VIP-support workflows
• Social media — increasingly important for external-facing customer support teams

Regional Coverage

The market research covers four major regions:

• Americas — United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil
• Asia-Pacific (APAC) — China, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, India, Australia
• Europe — Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Russia
• Middle East & Africa — Egypt, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, GCC countries

North America and Western Europe represent the largest installed bases, while APAC — particularly India and Southeast Asia — shows significant growth potential driven by digital-transformation investment and a large SME sector adopting cloud-first tooling.

Key Platforms in the Market

The following vendors are frequently cited in IT ticketing market analyses. This is not a ranked list or an endorsement; feature sets and pricing change regularly, so always evaluate against your own requirements.

• Zendesk — broad enterprise feature set, strong marketplace of integrations, widely used in both IT ops and customer support
• Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk) — deep integration with the Atlassian ecosystem; popular with software-development and DevOps teams already using Jira for issue tracking
• Freshservice — ITSM-focused SaaS platform with ITIL-aligned workflows, asset management and AI-assisted triage
• ServiceDesk Plus (ManageEngine) — on-premise and cloud, strong in mid-market enterprises, ITIL-certified
• Zoho Desk — cost-effective option within the broader Zoho suite; good for organisations already using Zoho CRM
• HubSpot Service Hub — primarily customer-facing; integrates tightly with HubSpot CRM and marketing tooling
• HappyFox — mid-market help desk with solid automation and SLA management
• SysAid — ITSM platform with built-in asset management and workflow automation
• Samanage (now SolarWinds Service Desk) — cloud-based ITSM with service catalog and change management
• Vision Helpdesk — multi-channel, multi-company support; suited to MSPs
• Jitbit — lightweight SaaS or self-hosted option for smaller teams
• HarmonyPSA — professional services automation combined with help desk; targeted at managed service providers
• Mojo IT Helpdesk — Google Workspace-integrated ticketing
• Bitrix24 — collaboration suite with built-in help desk and CRM functionality
• Shape — workflow automation platform with ticketing components

Market Drivers for DevOps and IT Operations Teams

Several forces are pushing organisations to invest in or upgrade their ticketing platforms:

1. Remote-Work Normalisation

Distributed teams generate higher ticket volumes for VPN access, endpoint management and collaboration-tool support. Cloud-based help desks let support agents work from anywhere without VPN tunnels back to an on-premise ticketing server.

2. ITSM and DevOps Convergence

Modern platforms bridge the gap between ITSM processes (incident, problem, change, release management) and DevOps pipelines. Bidirectional integrations with GitHub, GitLab, PagerDuty and monitoring tools mean that a production alert can automatically open a ticket, be assigned to an on-call engineer, linked to a deployment event and closed when a fix is merged — all without manual steps.

3. AI-Assisted Triage and Deflection

Machine-learning classifiers that auto-categorise and route tickets, combined with chatbot-first deflection to knowledge-base articles, are now table-stakes features in enterprise-tier plans. They reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and free engineers for higher-value work.

4. Compliance and Audit Requirements

SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and similar frameworks require documented evidence that changes and incidents were tracked, reviewed and resolved. A ticketing system with immutable audit logs and change-management workflows is frequently a prerequisite for certification.

5. Self-Service Portals Reducing Ticket Volume

A well-maintained knowledge base and self-service portal can deflect 20–40% of routine tickets (password resets, software requests, FAQ-type queries) — though exact deflection rates vary widely by organisation. This scales support capacity without adding headcount.

Evaluating IT Ticketing Software: A Practical Checklist

When assessing platforms for a DevOps or IT operations team, consider the following:

• Integration depth — native connectors to your monitoring stack (Datadog, PagerDuty, Prometheus Alertmanager), version control (GitHub/GitLab) and chat (Slack, Teams)
• Automation capabilities — rule-based routing, SLA breach alerts, auto-escalation and approval workflows without requiring code
• ITIL alignment — whether you need formal change advisory board (CAB) workflows, CMDB integration or problem management features
• Reporting and SLO tracking — dashboards for mean time to acknowledge (MTTA), MTTR, first-contact resolution rate and backlog trends
• Data residency and security — SOC 2 Type II certification, SSO/SAML support, role-based access control and audit logging
• Total cost of ownership — per-agent vs. per-ticket pricing, storage costs, add-on module pricing and migration effort
• Scalability — API rate limits, attachment storage limits and concurrent-user performance at your expected ticket volume

COVID-19’s Lasting Impact on the Market

The 2020 pandemic accelerated cloud adoption across the ITSM segment. Organisations that had deferred SaaS migration moved quickly once office-based support teams became unavailable. This created durable demand for cloud-native ticketing tools and is reflected in SaaS revenue growth across most major vendors. The shift also highlighted the fragility of on-premise deployments that required physical access to servers for maintenance.

Summary

The IT ticketing system software market is mature but actively evolving, driven by AI-assisted automation, deeper DevOps integration and the continued migration from on-premise to SaaS deployment models. For engineering and IT operations teams, the right platform is the one that integrates cleanly with your existing toolchain, enforces your SLA commitments, provides audit-ready reporting and scales with your incident volume — not necessarily the one with the largest market share.

Evaluate at least two or three platforms against a representative sample of your real ticket types before committing. Most major vendors offer free trials or freemium tiers sufficient for a meaningful proof-of-concept.

Guardicore, HubSpot, Zscaler, Domo, SAP, Slack, CloudBolt Software, OpsRamp, Fortinet, Zoho, Skykick, and New Relic are the most likely to be recommended by their employees to friends looking for a cloud computing company to work for in 2020.
Cloud software companies dominate the highest-rated cloud businesses when indexed by the percent of employees who would recommend their company to a friend.
Taken together, the 12 CEOs leading the top-rated cloud computing companies are approved by 96% of employees as of February 20, 2020, on Glassdoor. CEOs in this group include Brian Halligan of HubSpot, Josh James of Domo, Jay Chaudhry of Zscaler, Stewart Butterfield of Slack, Sridhar Vembu of Zoho and Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein of SAP.
These and many other insights are from an analysis completed today comparing Computer Reseller News’ 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors of 2020 by their respective Glassdoor scores. The Computer Reseller News annual list of the 100 coolest cloud computing vendors is an impartial, 3rd party benchmark of the fastest-growing and most likely to hire cloud businesses expanding today. By far, the most common request from Forbes readers is which cloud computing companies are the best to work for. The goal of this analysis is to provide readers with insights into which cloud computing companies best fit their skills and at the same time, have a strong reputation based on feedback from existing employees.

Indexing the most interesting and fastest-growing cloud computing companies by their Glassdoor scores and reputations is a great way to begin defining a long-term career growth strategy. One factor not quantified is how well of a fit an applicant is to company culture. Take every opportunity for in-person interviews, read Glassdoor ratings often and observe as much as possible about daily life in companies of interest to see if they are a good fit for your skills and strengths.

Using the 2020 CRN list as a baseline to compare the Glassdoor scores of the (%) of employees who would recommend this company to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO, the table below is provided. You can find the original dataset here. There are 16 companies on the CRN list that don’t have that many or any entries on Glassdoor, and they are excluded from the rankings shown below. You can find their mention in the original dataset. If the image below is not visible in your browser, you can view the rankings here.

This article explains what IT ticketing systems do, reviews the major platforms in use today, and helps engineering and operations teams evaluate their options.

What Is an IT Ticketing System?

An IT ticketing system (also called a help desk or service desk platform) is software that converts incoming support requests — from email, web forms, chat, or monitoring alerts — into discrete work items called tickets. Each ticket has a lifecycle: creation, assignment, work in progress, resolution, and closure. Most platforms also support:

• SLA tracking: Automatic escalation when response or resolution deadlines are approaching.
• Categorization and routing: Rules that assign tickets to the right team or individual based on type, priority, or keyword.
• Knowledge base integration: Linking tickets to documented solutions to reduce repeat incidents.
• Reporting and analytics: Dashboards showing ticket volume, resolution time, and agent performance.
• Change and problem management: ITIL-aligned workflows for managing planned changes and root-cause investigations.

Deployment Models: On-Premise vs. Cloud-Based

Most IT ticketing platforms are available in two deployment configurations, each with distinct trade-offs:

Cloud-Based (SaaS)

The vendor hosts and operates the infrastructure. Setup is fast — often measured in hours rather than weeks — and updates are applied automatically. Teams pay a recurring subscription, usually per agent per month. This model suits organizations that want low operational overhead and rapid onboarding. It is the dominant choice for SMEs and for distributed or remote teams.

On-Premise

The organization installs and operates the software on its own servers or private cloud. This gives maximum control over data residency, network isolation, and customization, which is important for regulated industries (finance, healthcare, defense). The trade-off is higher operational responsibility: your team owns patching, backups, scaling, and availability.

Some vendors offer a hybrid path — a self-managed installation that can optionally sync to a cloud-based reporting or analytics layer.

Leading IT Ticketing Platforms

The following platforms are widely used across DevOps, IT operations, and customer support teams. This is not a ranked list or a benchmark — evaluate each against your own requirements.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a cloud-native customer service and IT support platform. It offers a polished agent interface, strong omnichannel support (email, chat, phone, social), and an extensive marketplace of integrations. Zendesk Suite includes ticketing, a knowledge base (Guide), live chat (Messaging), and analytics (Explore). It is popular with customer-facing support teams but also used for internal IT help desks. Its REST API is well-documented and widely used for custom integrations.

Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk)

Atlassian’s Jira Service Management is tightly integrated with Jira Software, making it a natural fit for DevOps teams that already use Jira for issue tracking. It supports ITIL practices including incident, problem, change, and service request management. Its main strength is the direct link between service desk tickets and development issues — an incident ticket can be escalated directly to a Jira Software sprint. It is available as a cloud service or as a self-managed (Data Center) deployment.

Vision Helpdesk

Vision Helpdesk is a multi-channel help desk platform available in both SaaS and on-premise editions. It supports multi-company or multi-brand deployments through its Satellite Help Desk feature, which is useful for managed service providers (MSPs) or enterprises operating multiple product lines. It includes ITIL-aligned ITSM features in its higher-tier plans.

Samanage (now SolarWinds Service Desk)

Originally branded as Samanage, this platform is now part of SolarWinds as SolarWinds Service Desk. It offers IT service management with built-in IT asset management (ITAM), giving teams a single platform to track both service tickets and the hardware or software assets involved. It is cloud-based and targets mid-market to enterprise IT departments.

HappyFox

HappyFox is a straightforward cloud-based help desk aimed at teams that want quick setup and ease of use. It supports email, chat, phone, and social media channels and includes automation rules, canned responses, and a knowledge base. It positions itself as an alternative for teams that find Zendesk or Jira Service Management overly complex for their scale.

HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot’s Service Hub adds ticketing and help desk functionality on top of HubSpot’s CRM. For teams already using HubSpot for sales and marketing, it removes the need for a separate customer data integration. It is best suited to customer-facing support rather than internal IT operations.

Primary Use Cases by Organization Size

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

SMEs typically prioritize low administrative overhead, rapid onboarding, and predictable per-agent pricing. Cloud-based platforms with sensible defaults and pre-built integrations reduce the need for dedicated platform administrators. HappyFox, Zendesk (Starter plans), and HubSpot Service Hub are commonly evaluated at this tier.

Large Enterprises

Enterprises need advanced workflow customization, role-based access control, audit trails, SSO/SAML integration, and often on-premise or private-cloud deployment for compliance reasons. Jira Service Management Data Center, SolarWinds Service Desk, and Vision Helpdesk’s on-premise edition are frequently evaluated at this tier. Large organizations also tend to require API-level integration with CMDB, monitoring tools, and CI/CD pipelines.

Key Selection Criteria for DevOps Teams

When evaluating an IT ticketing system for a DevOps or platform engineering context, consider the following criteria in addition to general feature comparisons:

• API quality and webhook support: Can your monitoring tools, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure automation create and update tickets programmatically?
• Integration with alerting tools: Native integrations with PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Prometheus Alertmanager, or similar reduce manual ticket creation during incidents.
• Change management workflows: Does the platform support CAB (Change Advisory Board) approval flows and integration with deployment pipelines?
• Incident management features: Severity levels, war-room channels, and post-incident review (PIR) templates.
• Link to developer workflows: Bi-directional sync with GitHub Issues, GitLab, or Jira Software for escalation from ops to engineering.
• Reporting granularity: Can you measure MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution), reopen rate, and SLA breach rates by service or environment?
• Data residency and compliance: If your organization operates under GDPR, HIPAA, or similar regulations, confirm where ticket data is stored and who has access.

Market Drivers and Trends

Several forces are shaping how IT ticketing systems evolve:

• AI-assisted triage: Machine learning models that auto-classify incoming tickets, suggest resolutions from the knowledge base, or predict escalation risk are becoming standard features rather than premium add-ons.
• Shift-left support: Embedding self-service portals and chatbots in developer portals or internal tooling so engineers can resolve common issues without raising a ticket.
• Unified observability and ticketing: Tighter integration between APM, log management, and ticketing systems so that anomaly detection automatically opens and enriches tickets with diagnostic context.
• ITIL 4 adoption: The updated ITIL framework encourages a value-stream focus rather than rigid process gates, and ticketing platforms are adapting their workflow templates accordingly.
• Cost optimization pressure: As SaaS costs scale with agent count, larger teams are evaluating open-source alternatives such as osTicket or Zammad alongside commercial platforms.

Summary

Choosing an IT ticketing system is not purely a procurement decision — it directly affects how quickly your team detects, responds to, and learns from operational events. The right platform depends on your team size, existing toolchain, compliance requirements, and how tightly you need to connect service management to engineering workflows.

Before committing to a platform, run a proof-of-concept with realistic ticket volumes, test the API against your automation requirements, and validate that the reporting capabilities give you the operational metrics your SLAs actually require.

Platform capabilities change frequently. Verify current feature sets and pricing directly with each vendor before making a purchasing decision.