How do you ensure that your revenue stream is not impacted when you wean
away the customers from a yearly pricing model where annual fees and regular
upgrades make the sellers revenue pipeline perennially full? Is there a
cross-selling or up-selling benefit?
The profitability stage is still to be reached. Its a growing model that
will take time to deliver profits. The benefit for us is the acquisition of
customers, customer satisfaction and predictability of revenues. Yes, with SMBs
we get new and fresh customers of SaaS who are potentially attractive for next
stages of ERPs.
How tough is the competition in this territory of ERPs?
Going forward all ERP majors would come to this model. We are tapping it at
the initial stages and it is attractive especially for the SMBs who will form a
majority of the market and do not want to invest heavily into capex.
What roadblocks in particular do you see in the context of India when it
comes to SaaS?
Internet and the relevant levels of bandwidth for SaaS is a major concern.
Then there are issues like consumers psyche on recovery model, etc but I see
that interest levels are picking up especially in the SMB space.
Does SaaS work well on pan-enterprise requirements and security issues
where multiple users are hosted on a single Web-server outside?
Be it client-architecture where a user chooses to make his own organization
IT savvy or a service-architecture model where the user chooses to make the
client accountable, scalability is not an issue. As to concerns on management
and security, its a multi-tenancy technology. The software would appear
differently for each user whenever he/she plugs in as per their domain.
How relevant is SaaS to the deliverables on Green IT?
It is a very relevant model. The biggest aspect of traditional ERP model is
maintenance. The client-server model may not be necessarily green as the user
might be stuck with one version and has to adapt to new patches, documentation
and AMCs every year. SaaS, on the other hand is always available on the latest
platform. The plug-and-play mode becomes green naturally.
Besides, conventional ERP needs high capitale xpenditure, direct and indirect
investments, balloons costs with long implementation time. SaaS, on the contrary
has no capital expenditure, no investments. It is a low-subscription model with
implementation done in weeks.
Pratima Harigunani/CyberMedia News
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in