Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has unleashed a new wave of opportunities for software product firms in India, who are in their early phase of growth. These software firms are developing ready-to-use SaaS applications for small and medium enterprise (SMEs) and enterprise customers and offering them on-the-cloud (internet) as a service. This is not only providing them easy access to a larger audience, but helping them make money from day one.
Picture this. Using the SaaS model, an SME firm based out of Bangalore is offering digital publishing solutions to publishing houses and organisations located in America, Europe and many other continents.
Impelsys Inc recently offered its SaaS-based flagship iPublishCentral solutions to Vilnius Gediminas Technical University in Lithuania, a continent in Northern Europe. What makes this partnership special is that this is the first iPublishCentral offering in the Lithuanian language. iPublishCentral helped the university offer over 300 eBooks to its readers, through the portal.
Similarly, TravelCarma, a small firm based in Gujarat, offers travel solutions in Frankfurt. CEO Saurabh Mehta said his company has developed an e-commerce (booking engine) and other modules inside facebook, which helps customers leverage the power of social media for increasing direct revenues. While SaaS as a platform for delivering applications is there for quite sometime, companies have started to realise its true potential in the post-recession phase.
“Post recession, the lure of saving costs is attracting companies to take advantage of SaaS-based applications as it does not require them to invest upfront on physical infrastructure, deployment and training. As it requires zero capex and low opex, the adoption is also getting momentum,” said Sunil Padmanabh, Research Director at Gartner India.
Recently, Nasscom, the industry body that represents the software firms in India, identified top eight emerging/start-up companies who have developed ready-to-use SaaS applications. In an exclusive panel discussion with Business Standard, Nasscom president Som Mittal along with these companies discussed about opportunities and challenges for such SaaS-based applications going forward.
“SaaS addresses the ‘reach’ issue and helps in marketing the products in places where they don’t have a physical presence. Unlike the licensed products, SaaS applications are user-friendly and cost-effective,” said Mittal.
Industry believes SaaS provides excellent paradigms for product companies to reach out to the mass of small businesses that require IT solutions.
“SaaS helps product companies in many ways. In terms of go to market, it levels the playing field for everyone, delivering software as a service enables us to capture a bigger and a wider market. Bigger, because it allows us to go after the target companies. Wider, because SaaS eliminates physical borders and enables us to go after the market globally,” said Sameer Shariff, founder and CEO, Impelsys.
The world-wide market for SaaS applications is estimated to be around $40 billion, of which customer relationship management (CRM)-based applications market size is about $11 billion. The only well-known SaaS CRM provider Salesforce.com has a market share of only five per cent.
However, the Indian companies who offer SaaS-based applications don’t compete with companies such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft dynamics, but have identified various areas like travel, hospitality, payroll management and publishing to offer specialised solutions based on the clients’ needs. The major advantage of SaaS is accessibility as applications are offered on the web as a service.
