CIOInsider India Magazine
SaaS - How Changing Businesses Impement The Technology & Create Employment
In an interaction with CIO Insider magazine, Varun Chopra, CIO, Studds Accessories Ltd, expounds on why SaaS are betting big technology innovations for providing the solutions of modern-day businesses, and how to overcome problems of using SaaS technology.
1.The SaaS market has been witnessing rapid growth, with software products moving from on-premise to a cloud-based model. Which are the factors driving the increased SaaS adoption?
Whenever any CIO/IT Leader has to go to business leadership for a new initiative approval, questions that are popped up by business leadership are:
1)How much do we need to spend?
2)In how much time it will get implemented?
3)When will we start seeing the benefits/ROI?
4)What if we did not get the benefits as desired/ things did not go as per plan?
All these are factors push towards SaaS production adoption with key benefits as follows:
1)Faster time to market/deploy
2)Low initial investment
3)Faster visibility of benefits that may be perceived in longer run.
4)Data security as the key responsibility with SaaS provider while companies need to plan additional measures over it.
5)Reducing CIO pain of managing herculean infra depending on application size.
6)Decent support mechanism
7)If you don’t like or things do not go as per plan, ‘just stop it’.
2.Highlight some of the key strengths or winning formulae showcased by successful SaaS companies and elaborate on the factors that attract international companies to invest in Indian SaaS companies.
a.India is one of the largest knowledge hubs of the world with big tech pool and vast market. Every global player wants to be in India to cater to Indian customers. Indian SaaS based solutions are created more in accordance with Indian market needs.
b.While not as it used to be earlier, but still it’s a market where still at lower investment, you get high quality products which can be taken globally.
c.Lastly, Indian SaaS companies especially during last 2-3 years, have launched innovation solutions in latest tech like AI, ML, chatbots, cybersecurity apart from the direct business need related solutions
d.Previously, it was said that Bangalore was the startup hub of India, but during pandemic, Gurugam and other metro’s + even tier-2 towns are coming-up with startups at a rapid pace, as lot of young people are looking at being entrepreneurs to make a difference and this is something global companies want to tap.
3.Talk about the level of employment opportunities offered in this industry and what are the skill sets in demand?
As SaaS industry continues to expand, so does the employment opportunities which are increasing at a rapid pace.Agility, hard work and passion towards launching new products/solving business problems innovatively is a key skill required. Apart from those, technical skills in demand are:
•Industry Specific Business Analyst: These people provide know how on how to reinvent existing business processes through innovation solutions.
•Full Stack Developers who can plan, architect, and develop solutions at a quick pace
•Database experts with knowledge of traditional databases and modern databases like Hadoop.
•Cloud Computing specialists especially on Azure and AWS
•AI/ML professionals are difficult to find and very much in demand.
•U are in a high demand, as they have a huge responsibility to safe
•Mobile app developers as business needs SaaS products on mobile with a great UI/UX.
Indian SaaS companies especially during last 2-3 years, have launched innovation solutions in latest tech like AI, ML, chatbots, cybersecurity apart from the direct business need related solutions
4.What are the current key SaaS trends driving India’s startup ecosystem?
In my view, key trends are:
1)Industry centric solutions solving problems which provides more visibility to data involved in business processes helps in decision making, connects the ecosystem, i.e good supply chain planning solution which integrates with all business processes.
2)Data Analytics & Data mining with tools like Tableau PowerBi, and others, which give business insights.
3)Bot-based solutions like RPA, chatbots supplemented with ML/AI are the next big thing
4)Innovation keeps happening on how to further ease collaboration/virtual working.
5)Cybersecurity solutions are evolving with newer detect, prevent, scan and respond techniques.
6)Cloud technologies are evolving at a rapid pace with both AWS and Azure making things very easy.
7)Innovations in Blockchain solutions in business is to be closely watched.
5.Where is India’s SaaS industry headed?
I think the Indian industry has a very exciting time ahead. Freshwork getting listed in NASDAQ itself was a very big thing. The company has grown fast with excellent customer centric solutions in the past few years. I think new innovations will keep on happening, which will allow business processes to reinvent themselves through innovative SaaS products.
I think there will be a lot of new companies coming, and with Indian Government also putting-in reforms like boosting inputs to various businesses like support systems and equivalents are creating the buzz for India’s startup culture. A lot of companies that have been there in this space may become unicorns. So I think it’s an exciting time ahead and I think more and more innovative solutions may come-up, which may be at the end make customer’s life easy. It is important for this journey to go on for country’s success.
