The SME tech landscape in 2026 is wild. Technology has never been more prevalent in businesses. It is ubiquitous.

There's never been more choice - Buying in software through SaaS and PaaS models has opened the flood gates for tech to flow in to businesses with often little consideration. Dealing with "App overload" has become a good chunk of the Tech Management overhead.

Technology has never been more fragmented - Coming hand in hand with SaaS software is an often overlooked and growing areas of effort in terms of plugging systems together. While SaaS has taken away a lot of the work and risk in terms of procuring new systems, the integration part of projects has increased exponentially.

This is the paradox of SaaS - The software bar to entry has never been lower, but to get the most out of systems and to aggregate platforms together in to a coherent whole still requires specialist knowledge which may not be available in house.

Meanwhile, SaaS has allowed for a mix of "black box" software to infiltrate at a critical levels where businesses have little or no sovereignty over their stack and become tied into products even if they are not 100% right or it turns out the SaaS promise wasn't quite what the sales guy said.

This is the space where Aperic plays

We help businesses to home in and target their most valuable use cases, ensuring that stakeholders with no technical knowledge are able to have their needs heard and understood.

We aren't here to sell you SaaS or make decisions for you; but we are here to make sure everything comes together into the unique, functional, cross-team and cross-business holistic approach that you need to get the most of out of your tech spend.

We do this in the most direct way possible; by continually showing you a working, functional version of the end product with no tech jargon and heavy documentation to wade through. We call it The Blueprint.

And once you have your Blueprint, there's more choice than ever in terms of how to get projects actually delivered. With costs to business higher than ever, leadership is looking for low costs and above all flexibility. At Aperic we embrace all models:

Insourcing - Great for projects which have a defined end point. Source and bring in a squad to deliver your project and at the end, let them move on giving you ultimate flexibility and the option to cut off spend when you need to.

Outsourcing - While it's not the "fire and forget" option that many promise, there are talented teams all around the world who work on flexible terms and at significantly lower cost than UK dev houses. You do need good project management internally and an engaged business to get the most out of it - and above all time.

In-housing - In-house is becoming the go-to model after many years of this falling out of favour in the early 10's. This is a high cost choice but provides permanence and potentially lower risk, if you can manage people properly.

Hyrbridised - This allows you to pick a mix of external specialists to supplement your internal, permanent skillset. This might be a platform or area specialist, or a way of bulking up an in-house team for Production mode.

External Partners - There's still room for traditional agencies although that model is shifting aggressively to smaller, nimble, flexible teams that can compete in terms of value with more active options. Some businesses - and clients - still seek white glove treatment and that more complete experience is where agencies can shine.

Synthetic Development - AI based tooling has progressed radically even in the last 6 months and is starting to become a viable solution for real, working production projects. We embrace this option; all our Blueprints are "machine ready" coming complete with the Context files, Prompt Engineering and data fragments needed to be able to instruct AI tooling accurately. While we still recommend pairing this with real developers, the gap is closing.

At Aperic we sit on a 25 Year network of high quality, approved technical contacts that span all these models and beyond. When you work with us you get access to this network helping whatever model you choose be a success from the outset. We can help you meet people or businesses and hire them, we can work with your procurement team in plain English, providing specialist insight into sourcing the right players for your job; or leverage machine intelligence to deliver part or all of your project.

Irrespective of the choice that's right for you, 2026 is going to be a big year. All Change indeed.