SaaS and Silicon Valley are Game-Changers in India

A revolution is taking place in India’s businesses, which is transforming India at large. It began with mobile phones. Although there were telephones in India prior to mobile phones, they never took off in a big way. But mobile phones are so inexpensive and provide such great benefits that now everybody has a phone. The software-as-a-service model is a similar phenomenon in that SaaS fills a void that could not be filled in any other way. SaaS is an inexpensive way for India’s businesses to have good-quality software that makes their businesses much more efficient and effective.

SaaS will be even more of a game-changer in India than it has been in the United States. It’s not just because of the pricing model; it’s also because the time is right. SaaS products are proliferating at the same time as ubiquitous mobile devices and the flood of Big Data are causing companies to look for new business solutions. As businesses embrace SaaS for their critical business functions, they get more velocity in their business, which makes them more competitive in their markets.

Local products — made by local Indian software companies that understand the local business needs — are a key factor in the growing use of SaaS solutions. Improvement of Internet services in India has also contributed to SaaS adoption. A third factor is the fear that not using SaaS solutions will cause a company to be an outlier. This was not the case a couple of years ago. So it’s a tipping point-phenomenon coupled with more availability of local products at a very attractive price point.

A major transition is underway in the technology stack. In the life cycle of the software industry, new solutions typically come from startups and small companies as opposed to large companies. We see this happening again today in India where the small, nimble startups are shifting their business to create SaaS solutions. Even so, some startups are dramatically more successful than others, due in large part to two enablers.

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About the author

Kathleen Goolsby
  • The sentiment expressed couldn’t be closer to the truth. In our own SaaS business we invented a pricing that we felt was a no-brainer and great value for money, because we decided to break away from the mould of calculating RoI of SaaS vs on-premise over a 3 year investment. More relevant, we’re constantly evaluating how to achieve world class product and support delivery while delivering at commoditised pricing. The best parallel to this is perhaps the mobile telephony history of India where low prices drove adoption and firms were still profitable when benchmarked on ARPU.

    I was talking the other day to a friend about accelerators in particular and how
    these ‘systematic innovation’ institutions are transforming product
    entrepreneurship in India – really a channelization of the creative
    energies into marketable products 🙂

    On SaaS, if we’re to push the envelope, I feel the days of
    monolithic apps are outnumbered and newer ways of driving adoption need to be experimented with – we’re doing a few experiments of our own!