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    Indian SaaS firms eye Japan, Latam to pip global giants

    Synopsis

    Indian firms are aiming to diversify focus on the Rest-of-the-World markets. The market expansion coincides with a push towards a platform play, creating a common design and engineering base from which products can be developed to meet a quicker time-tomarket paradigm.

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    Chennai-incubated Freshworks entered Japan last year by tying up with regional player OrangeOne Corporation.
    Indian Software-as-a-Service companies are speeding up forays into non-mainstay regions such as Japan and Latin America, as selling business software in advanced economies other than North America becomes increasingly important in taking the battle to market leaders such as Salesforce and Microsoft.

    North America, which includes Canada, remains the key target market for most companies, but clients have emerged in Singapore, Indonesia and Japan, as well as some countries in Latin America and Africa. The global SaaS business, dominated by the North American market, is slated to grow at a 16% clip to $116 billion this year, according to market research firm Gartner. Indian firms are aiming to diversify focus on the Rest-of-the-World markets. The market expansion coincides with a push towards a platform play – creating a common design and engineering base from which products can be developed to meet a quicker time-tomarket paradigm.

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    At the Sridhar Vembu-led Zoho, organising user events is one way to test new markets. Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho, said the company will enter the Brazilian market this year and will expand its team in Colombia, besides bolstering its presence in Chile.

    In 2019, it had a hectic pace of market evaluation with 33 user conferences across 25 countries.
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    It is also close to hiring its first set of employees in South Africa.

    Zoho entered The Netherlands, Singapore, Dubai, Mexico and Australia last year.

    The broad strokes of Zoho’s expansion model, according to Vegesna, were a predictive play on the next wave of growth.

    “If you overlap the GDP growth in a country with the median age, an interesting trend/theme will be noticeable: whenever the median age of a country is between 25 and 40, GDP of that country accelerates, sometimes exponentially. Part of it can be attributed to the acceleration of business formation, and job creation as a result. As the market expands and business formation accelerates, software and other vendors enter those regions...,” he said.

    Chennai-incubated Freshworks entered Japan last year by tying up with regional player OrangeOne Corporation.

    It seeks to replicate the re-seller model during other possible market entries, too.

    “We had setup a robust partner network before we entered the region in March last year with a regional hub in Singapore,” Freshworks’ regional spokesperson told ET, adding it would continue to invest in the ASEAN region.

    The Mathrubootham-founded Freshworks, headquartered in San Mateo, California, is reportedly in a growth push before going public in the United States. SaaS firms, which sell a gamut of products aiding customer relationship management to workflow automation, have also discovered the potential in ‘platformising’ technology, not dissimilar to the way a basic automotive design is parlayed into different car variants.


    The Economic Times

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