With the rise in the startup landscape, India is moving aggressively towards being digital

Breakthrough innovations in technology are happening at a rapid pace. These developments not only bolster business productivity, but also are the key drivers of economic growth and human progress. In India, fast-paced technological innovations have become key catalysts for the country's digital adoption. In the past couple of years, the country has seen tremendous growth in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry. SaaS refers to a cloud computing offering and a way of delivering applications over the Internet. It provides an alternative to standard software installation in the business environment, where users can build the server, install the application, and configure it.

With India's emerging startup landscape and its rapid strides in digital adoption, the demand for SaaS products is seeing an upward graph. According to data from NASSCOM, as of FY2020, the country's SaaS revenue has reached US$3.5 billion, with 75% sales coming from global markets. Another report from Bain & Co. noted that SaaS firms including Zoho, Freshworks, Druva, and Icertis have already garnered a US$100 million annual recurring revenue mark, with a healthy pipeline of companies well-placed to follow over the next 12 to 18 months.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly expedited enterprise cloud adoption as companies seek to keep going their business. An IDC survey published last November revealed that over 60 percent of the organisations in India plan to leverage cloud platforms for digital innovation as they re-strategise their IT spending plans as a result of the pandemic. The survey further divulged that the crisis enabled them to spend more on public cloud IaaS, PaaS solutions and SaaS.

As SaaS offers instant decision-making, cost-effectiveness, low risk and greater flexibility, among other features, the Indian SaaS market is poised to reach US$18 billion to US$20 billion in revenue by 2022. The software-as-a-service industry is still in its early days. As there is plenty of growth opportunities available in the industry, this is a great time to get started in the SaaS-driven business model.

The SaaS Growth

There is no wonder that the economic turmoil due to the epidemic caused global IT spending. Despite this, cloud spending holds a bright spot. The outlook for SaaS also seems bright and will remain constant this year and beyond, as companies build new capabilities to drive the next wave of innovation and growth. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, IoT and others are expected to power the SaaS offerings and so the adoption.

Today, every business relies on data to stay on top. They leverage future-proof IT solutions to keep their data available and ready for action every time. With the adoption of the cloud, storing and processing big data has become easier and more effective. And businesses can get the most of their data anytime, anywhere. However, managing, monitoring and securing data storage, at the same time, with a data protection service is inevitable.

Advantages of Harnessing the Power of SaaS

Greater Scalability

The very nature of SaaS applications being delivered over the cloud enforces an innate requirement for these applications to be elastic and to leverage the cloud benefits. SaaS applications allow users to choose the delivery model and easily adapt according to their business requirements. As software-as-a-service provides users the flexible subscription-based licensing, its applications scale easily.

Ease of use and Speed

Deployment of a business application requires administration time and effort. Compared to traditional models, SaaS offers ease of use and faster application deployment because the application is already installed and configured. Users can simply provision the server in the cloud, and they will have the application ready for use in a fraction of time.

Cost Efficiency

SaaS applications substantially lower companies' budget devoted to IT spending as it typically resides in a shared environment. That means the hardware and software license costs are low against the traditional model. As SaaS offers great flexibility in terms of licensing, its feature-rich apps are quite easy to use and custom-made for each business's requirements.