February rundown: SaaS-pocalypse now?

(Image credit: Future)

February is the shortest month, but you wouldn’t know it from the sheer amount of news that’s broken in just the past 26 days.

Amid growing fears of AI stealing jobs, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has claimed that firms are simply using the technology as an excuse for mass layoffs. Earlier this month, a series of Anthropic releases drove stocks down at a range of companies – all tied to fears that the SaaS model might be on its way out.

Also this month, Pure Storage has rebranded as Everpure – what’s behind this decision and what does it say about the company’s strategy going forward?

In this episode, Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to explore some of February’s biggest stories.

Highlights

"The central concern here is that a lot of AI companies, particularly Anthropic and OpenAI etc, are now launching sector-specific tools that are very proficient here, to the point where a lot of customer service, or legal industry tasks can be conducted by agents, automated. This has a lot of investors concerned about the long-term impact on the software as a service industry – you have a lot of, again, sector-specific software companies, very specific tools based on particular tasks within multiple industry verticals."

"These are comments that Sam Altman made at the New Delhi AI Impact Summit last week, essentially around the fact that a lot of companies are 'AI washing'. Which, roughly translated, means they're using AI as an excuse for layoffs, when the reality is that there's potentially poor financial performance there or ulterior motives."

"So this ties in with a big acquisition here from Everpure, formerly Pure Storage of 1touch, which is a data orchestration and management platform. The rebrand here is interesting because, you know, I attended Pure Accelerate 2025, Pure Storage's annual conference, and a big focus there was around, the data management aspect of what they're looking at now with their platform approach. They launched their enterprise data cloud, which again, is an all-encompassing ecosystem."

Footnotes

TOPICS

Rory Bathgate was Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro until 2026, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He also co-hosted the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory on LinkedIn.

Highlights

Footnotes

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