What types of ISVs are making SaaS transformation

What types of ISVs are making this transformation and how complex is it? Further, can you give an early glimpse of the applications emerging in SaaS market?

All kinds of ISVs have an inclination to move to SaaS, be they startups or large enterprises. According to a recent private survey, 80% of Asian enterprises, including India, would make this transformation. You would find them across verticals in Telecom, Healthcare, BFSI and so on.

A variety of applications would be suited for delivery through SaaS. Data crunching / analytical applications, which can manage processor intensive operations and data mining in the background for business needs that may not need real-time data, can go as SaaS. Other good candidates for SaaS include: seasonal enterprise applications such as financial, payroll applications, which churn out quarterly numbers; high performance applications - which need auto-scale out and scale down and parallel computing applications that need to perform multiple tasks in parallel so that a huge project may be executed in a short period of time.

But there would be also be applications which cannot be offered through SaaS model currently. The obvious limiting factors include data security, potential lock-in with a cloud provider, efficiency of moving data in and out of the cloud, integration with existing services outside of the cloud platform, and legal/privacy concerns. Especially so, mission critical applications may not be put on cloud. Even if cloud becomes secure, there would be issues with networking delays.

To become SaaS players, ISVs would have to plan their transformation well. It would be easier for companies which have designed their products using technology available in the last three to four years. Many Indian companies typically started off as customized application providers and then evolved into product companies. They can seek to enter SaaS-2 immediately, only if they have designed their products well. A key test here would be how scalable their products are. Other considerations such as Quality of Service parameters (performance, resilience and so on), auto-provisioning, auto-customizability, providing for customer support would also need to be met. If the companies can meet these requirements, their journey would be easier.