With SMBs we get fresh customers of SaaS

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



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