The Tech Adoption Index rolled out its new podcast “Above the Cloud” this week, with the inaugural episode featuring an interview with Blissfully.com CEO Ariel Diaz. Blissfully recently released its “2018 SMB SaaS Trends Report” — a comprehensive look at how small businesses are consuming SaaS, which SaaS tools are leading in key categories and other key trends.

We talked to Ariel about his company and what it does (rationalizing SaaS uses by companies to save money on unused or redundant software), as well as what the report says about the SMB SaaS industry in 2018.

Diaz said the impetus for the report was a desire to understand, as a small business owner, the key trends in SMB SaaS so they can make good decisions for deploying technology to run their businesses.

“We wanted to use the data we have across our aggregated customer base and see if we could create unique, useful and interesting data around SaaS trends that can help businesses make better decisions,” Diaz said.

Our interview with Ariel begins at the 12:06 mark of the podcast.

Before our interview with Ariel, my Tech Adoption Index colleague Neal Polachek and I reviewed Mary Meeker’s recently released annual PowerPoint magnum opus on Internet Trend. We examine which nuggets were most relevant to our coverage area — the small business cloud and the emerging SMB technology stack. You can read what we came up with on Neal’s post from last week.

You can listen to the full podcast here:

Please follow the podcast on Soundcloud. You can also subscribe to Above the Cloud on either Apple iTunes or Google Play.

Next week’s episodes of Above the Cloud will feature Josh Melick, founder and CEO of Broadly, and Jacqueline Cook, chief strategy officer of Vendasta.

Finally, we want to thank our sponsors for this episode of Above the Cloud: Mono Solutions, Boostability and Net-Linx.