DUBLIN, IRELAND: Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "India's Big Guns Set Their Sights On SaaS And The Cloud" report to their offering.

This Strategic Perspective explores the current and mid-term Cloud and SaaS strategies of five of the leading Indian offshore giants, Cognizant, Infosys, Satyam, TCS and Wipro, based on a series of recent deep-dive briefings and research that has been conducted.

The majority of the service providers that we were briefed by are developing Centers of Excellence to "SaaS-ify" existing corporate customer applications (when appropriate), reuse and leverage their significant process and application knowledge, and productize services for the market. In addition, many have developed significant practices deploying leading-edge SaaS solutions such as Salesforce.com, as well as providing services to ISVs transitioning from on-premise to SaaS (either through virtualized versions of their existing offerings, or new multi-tenant solutions). As our briefings continued, it became clear that the Indian service giants believe that Cloud and SaaS represents a significant opportunity - especially if they can wrap vertical expertise and intellectual property (IP), either in the form of value-added extensions to existing SaaS players, or by creating proprietary horizontal and industry-specific SaaS offerings and business services (or process utilities).

Cloud Computing will also help service providers reach the small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) - a segment that has been underserved by most of the leading Indian providers that have traditionally focused on serving the Global 2000. An early leader in this regard is TCS with its' soup-to-nuts "IT-as-a-Service" offering, which combines third party SaaS solutions with newly built/proprietary TCS assets and IP (horizontal and vertical). If the trial continues to go well in India, anticipate a broader roll-out in 2010-2011. If marketed and supported appropriately, Cloud and SaaS-based SMB initiatives like this could bear significant fruit in the longer term - so long as providers manage the cost of delivery carefully.