‘SaaSpocalypse’ debate intensifies as software stocks swing wildly

Michael Cannon-Brookes, co-CEO of Atlassian.Scott Mlyn | CNBCThe "SaaSpocalypse" was raging this week. Then it got a reprieve.The pennies-on-the-dollar acquisition of one-time highflyer Airtable, followed by plunges in HubSpot, Datadog and Figma on earnings reports, all served to underscore investor concerns that artificial intelligence models are eating away at the value of costly software products."I do think that companies are going to continue to use these coding agents to build functionality to maybe act as a little bit of pressure on renewals," said Matt Hedberg, a software analyst at RBC Capital Markets.But by the end of the week, Wall Street was reminded that there's still juice left in an industry that, not long ago, was viewed as driving innovation and was trading at hefty market multiples. Twilio, a provider of cloud-based communications software, and Atlassian, which sells collaboration tools, each saw pops of well over 20% on Friday after reporting quarterly results. Cloudflare, which helps protect websites from cyber attacks, gained 5.6%. Box CEO Aaron Levie, who's been evangelizing cloud software since he started his file-sharing company more than two decades ago, wa...