Pacific Crest Securities, the premier investment bank for technology, held its 10th Emerging Technology Summit in San Francisco on March 3-4. The investment bank hosted more than 1,100 participants at the conference, including executives from more than 250 public and private technology companies and 500 investment professionals from industry-leading venture capital, private equity, mutual and hedge funds.

Pacific Crest’s team captured insights from technology thought leaders and reports the following emerging trends will transform the competitive landscape for several tech sectors, including Security & Data Analytics, SaaS, Cloud Infrastructure and Consumer, Internet & Digital, through the next several years.

• Private companies in Security Software & Data Analytics will continue to experience triple-digit growth due to high-profile breaches and the willingness from enterprises to invest in security infrastructure.

• The SaaS space will experience a continued infrastructure shift from software-defined to developer-defined.

• CIOs are increasingly willing to move mission-critical applications to the cloud.

• New e-commerce companies are avoiding Amazon and finding unique ways to partner with traditional retailers to create compelling experiences and gain customers.

“The landscape of the technology industry is always shifting, but lately we’ve seen even greater volatility than usual as established players are increasingly under siege from disruptive, well-funded startups,” said Scott Sandbo, chairman and chief executive officer of Pacific Crest Securities. “We were excited to expand the roster for this year’s event to include even more disruptive, growing private and public companies that are defining new delivery models into traditional industries and connecting them with the investor community.”

The results of Pacific Crest’s exclusive Annual SaaS survey were also released at this year’s event. Among the survey findings are an expected significant increase in IT spend in the coming year; and market share gain by traditional top vendor incumbents (such as MSFT, Oracle) after being taken on by new comers (including Brightcove, Netsuite) in the past few years.