BANGALORE, INDIA: Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming the latest buzz-word for business. By 2010, Gartner predicts around 30 per cent of new license purchases (in APAC excluding Japan) will be in form of SaaS, or delivered through the SaaS model.

SaaS Summit 2009, organized by Ramco Systems, today in Bangalore, presented some of the key trends in SaaS models.

"SaaS is the new reality, which enterprises are facing," said M S Krishnan, professor of Business Information Technology at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.

"Recession has taught a lesson for restructuring of businesses as the market becomes more and more competing and giving way for newer technologies like SaaS. The social demand for these models have increased which are going to transform the business models," he added.

Balka Baruah Aggarwal, Manager, Syndicated Research, Springboard Research said IT department in enterprises have begun to move to the back-end and the focus is turning on the large scale business goals.

"IT has become the secondary focus," she said. "SaaS plays a vital role in this fundamental shift of enterprises looking at their technology investments, as it allows them to keep the focus on their business without worrying about the technology as well as successfully tweaks into your business process."

The event witnessed the delivery of ERP on a SaaS model as the emerging trend. With no initial investment costs, affordable pricing models as well as flexibility to customization, ERP on SaaS was seen as the next innovative technology by the speakers of the Summit.

Highlighting their company as an example, A Manivannnan, vice president, C&B Sujana Metal Products Ltd, said, "One of our purposes is not to have any IT team in our company, that is why we went for a web-hosted ERP model. We also realized that the model can be quickly implemented and also scale our future requirements without any huge investments."

The Ramco systems has deployed Ramco OnDemand ERP for the Sujana Metal products Limited.

P. R Venketrama Raja, vice-chairman and MD, Ramco Systems said, "This is not a trivial product, our web hosted product has done multiple complex implementation at various locations for the entire Sujana Group. All this being done within a time span of three weeks."

He further added that this is the next generation architecture for enterprise applications.

However the delegates at the even also agreed that enterprises on large scale are not ready to adopt new technologies like SaaS due to a wrong conceived notion that it is not required for them.

"Indian companies should be bold enough to experiment with new solutions like this. There is a huge opportunity to change and transform the business models as newer approaches are changing the rules," added Krishnan.