India to witness SaaS sojourn

MUMBAI, INDIA: For those of you who often end up breaking your heads on knowing how to implement new software installed in your systems, the solution is right away.

Gone are the days when implementing business applications required considerable amount of training and expertise to get a hand on it. The advent of Software as a Service (SaaS) has been instrumental in this phenomenon.

The year 1999 witnessed Parker Harris and Marc Benioff co-founding Salesforce.com, which over the eight years has made a name for itself by giving birth to a new revolution of sorts — SaaS. Today, SaaS is betting big on India and Doug Farber, chief operating officer - Asia Pacific in Salesforce.com, said, “Its upto us to make SaaS a reality in India.”

Be it in terms of satisfaction or in terms of awareness, India and the Asia Pacific region are embracing SaaS like never before. One of the key drivers for this new model is the business user who prefers implementing a SaaS CRM/ERP against the traditional CRM/ERP application.

However, Farber points out, “Its not just CRM, we see a massive application of SaaS in other services as well.”

Over the years, SaaS has experienced exponential growth when the service providers or vendors began hosting applications making them available to users as a service and not as a product.

The SaaS market has been traditionally dominated by players such as Salesforce.com, Rightnow Technologies and WebEx Communications, but in 2007 traditional vendors such as Microsoft, Symantec, SAP and EMC joined this initiative.

For starters, Cisco acquired WebEx in a $3.2 billion acquisition. Symantec on its part launched its SaaS back-up service called Symantec Protection Network and Microsoft brought a ‘Software + Services’ as part of its vision.

If this was not enough, global search giant Google joined hands with Salesforce.com to bring forth Salesforce Group Edition featuring AdWords. This development means that the traditional software-licensing model would find it difficult to stay afloat.

Farber believes that the corporations in the SME space would be the biggest benefactors and Farber mentions, “SaaS is quicker, easier and cheaper to deploy than traditional software.”

He goes on to point that eminent organizations such as Symantec, Cisco, and Japan Post to name a few have standardized themselves on Salesforce.com.

On the flip side, challenges such as market education and fine-tuning of market strategy are the need of the hour. There is an ardent need to build good and efficient Internet interfaces, which would help SaaS see a surging growth in India.

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