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Reaching for the cloud: India's SaaS Journey

Summary: India's leading e-commerce business, Snapdeal, and auto-loan business Bajaj Finserv have
bet on cloud-based marketing apps. The CMO and CTO of both businesses discuss their experiences.

By Rajiv Rao | December 11, 2013 -- 04:48 GMT (10:18 IST)

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Perhaps no other country is in the vortex of so many revolutions as India. The cell phone, arriving
here in the beginning of this millennium, has transformed life in India--especially in the vast rural
hinterland where connectivity helps farmers access up-to-date information about their produce or
weather patterns so they can plan more efficiently. The advent of cheap smartphones promises to
disrupt ossified and inefficient industries such as education and healthcare.

"Six years ago, to accomplish what we have today [with the SaaS model] would have taken 5 times the duration of time and 10 times the current 100-person strong engineering manpower that we have
in place."

- Amitabh Misra, SnapDeal

For corporate India, one of the chief drivers of change has been the Internet. It is, increasingly, the
dominant channel used to either sell products or attract and engage new customers. Consequently,
marketing is going through its own revolution as it is forced to shift from engaging with a broader
market to a fragmented media landscape. The increasingly global marketplace means there is an
imperative for marketers to widen their net, leading to escalating IT costs attributable to the
marketing function.
Five years ago, marketing on the Internet in India would have meant designing in-house systems for
activities such as customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Products and tools from global software vendors were available, but integration and customization

often meant heavy up front capex spends. Now, the SaaS (software-as-a-service) wave--a delivery
model in which software and related data are centrally hosted on the cloud, and can be accessed
through a Web browser--is sweeping across the Indian business landscape as it has in other
economies.
"SaaS is extremely real in India and there is a large critical mass in adoption," said Sunil
Padmanabhan, research director for Gartner in India. "It is already upending marketing as we know it,
ushering in inexpensive, plug-and-play new ways of managing customer relationships, orchestrating
cross channel marketing, and implementing digital advertising."
It also provides inexpensive but sophisticated tools to mine and analyze volumes of data arising from
these activities to improve decision-making. However, much of the action to date has been in the small
and midsize business (SMB) space where the consumption of CRM and ERP tools has been fairly large.
Padmanabhan noted that while Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft are some of the lead implementers, a few
local players such as Ramco have also stormed the market, propelling the SaaS annual growth rate in
the region to 28 percent.

Testing out more options with SaaS

Leading India e-commerce site Snapdeal has comprehensively embraced a SaaS solution. With
minimal upfront costs, SaaS presents a tremendous advantage for startups like Snapdeal. Such
businesses can try as many new tools as possible rather than committing long-term to one customized
solution. But that was not the principal reason Snapdeal decided to adopt a SaaS model.
"We treat our website as real estate. Our opportunity cost of it not working well is huge," said
Sandeep Komaravelly, the site's chief marketing officer (CMO). He added that SaaS clearly presented
itself as the most stable solution available.
Consequently, all of the company's CRM tools are in the cloud as well as 20 percent to 30 percent of
its analytics. The rest was built in-house.
Snapdeal uses Google AdWords for tweeting catalogues and listings, contextual advertising, customer
loyalty programs and roll out campaigns in addition to using various tools built on top. Figuring out
browsing patterns, keeping tabs on new and repeat visitors and monitoring the health of the website
is a life and death business for the company.
"We live and breathe analytics," said Amitabh Misra, chief technology officer (CTO) at Snapdeal,
adding that the SaaS tool of choice is Adobe's Omniture.
Being free of legacy technology, Snapdeal was among the first companies in India to place its entire
tech infrastructure on the cloud from the get-go, including its storage, web accelerator, and firewall
components.

Making faster decisions

Migrating to a SaaS model makes sense for an e-commerce company like Snapdeal, but it's just as
relevant for Bajaj Finserv, which deals in the age-old business of auto loans. A principal reason for
Bajaj's adoption of SaaS is because, like Snapdeal, Bajaj increasingly needed the ability to make
decisions faster.
"Winners and losers today are determined by speed to market," said Devang Mody, president of
consumer business, who also oversees marketing. However, the company's in-house customized
lending platform--a motley combination of home-grown CRM, Microsoft Access, and a series of Excel

spreadsheets--was unable to meet this criteria. It was painful to manage, difficult to scale, lacked
accuracy, and was "just not solving the very urgent needs of the company," added Rakesh Bhatt, chief
operating officer (COO), who also oversees technology for Bajaj Finserv.
The company chalked out some very clear objectives for sales and marketing apps: it needed a
solution with unlimited scalability for end-to-end, new loan underwriting, and one that allowed them to
cross-sell multiple products on its existing customer database.

SnapDeal CTO Sandeep Komaravelly

Another problem that needed to be addressed was the company's susceptibility to seasonal skews.
During the Diwali festival season, for instance, it would have to process 50,000 loans a day--a
mammoth 10 times that of its regular capacity. Additionally, there are tens of thousands of retail
points spread across thousands of Indian cities. With the new SaaS system, Bajaj hoped to also build
a campaign-management system targeting customers with good credit.
The Indian company decided to adopt Salesforce.com's service cloud offering, which included data
analytics, sales process and CRM coupled with Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)
and 0ffice 365 communication tools.
Bhatt's decision to go with Microsoft's cloud e-mail and mobility tools proved to be a boon for the
company's consumer business head, Mody. "I didn't have to write to the tech department, so my team
and I could get access to reports on mobile. It was easily available," said Mody.
Additionally Bajaj's portal architecture, which is the main customer-facing interface that deals with
410,000-plus customers (both business-to-business and business-to-consumer) is entirely SaaSdriven.
"Today, 50 percent of our technology infrastructure is on SaaSfrom customer acquisition, to our
portal backend, digital architecture and messaging. However, core lending will take some time," said
Bhatt. The one hole? Analytics. "I would be glad if someone can offer it to me on a cloud," he added,
noting that so far core data warehousing is being done on a SQL server.
So how successful has SaaS been for both organizations?
"Adopting the SaaS model [was] very quick and easy and the experience extremely successful," said
Snapdeal CTO Misra. "Six years ago, to accomplish what we have today would have taken 5 times the
duration of time and 10 times, based on the current 100-person strong engineering manpower that we
have in place," explained Misra.
Komaravelly said his time-to-market implementation shrunk from nine months to a few weeks,
allowing the company to make quick decisions.

For Bajaj Finserv, Salesforce.com's offering boosted loan applications from 1,500 per day to a peak of
8,500 in a single day during the festival season. In particular, the facility for sending out SMS directly
from Salesforce.com to dealers to communicate loan approval has had a significant impact on loan
turnaround times, helping Bajaj to fulfil its ultimate goal in marketing the personal loan as a viable
alternative to credit card. Bhatt said overall productivity has sky-rocketed by up to 40 percent.

"Our company is increasingly seeing a handshake between technology and

marketing."
~ Rakesh Bhatt, COO for Bajaj Finserv

Empowering non-tech employees

The SaaS revolution in India is also bringing about another important change in organizations. "The
CMO today is even more empowered than before," said Gartner's Padmanabhan.
"Previously, there was extensive dependency on IT, but now the technology department is more and
more relegated to a support role for integration, data mining, overseeing contractual terms with
vendors, and so on. They focus more on keeping the lights on," he added.
Snapdeal's Komaravelly said: "If you think about it logically, why should a CIO think about what
makes an effective tech tool to market a product. Our CTO looks at how to increase stability on our
site, and I look at how to make every marketing investment more productive. That's the way it should
have been all along."
"If anything, SaaS makes the relationship between marketing and tech stronger," said Misra. He added
that at the end of the day, marketing tools are not that simple. There is always a level of
customization over and above the SaaS tools acquired. Only a proper engagement between the two
sides can ensure an efficient outcome, he noted.
Things are structured differently at Bajaj, though, despite its heavy reliance on the SaaS platform.
"At our company, the CTO owns the process. Fortunately he is business-friendly," said Mody. The
decision to select one technology over another essentially resides with the CTO, albeit after a thorough
process of discussion and debate. "Business and marketing must remain focused, and that's the way
we want to manage it for the next 2 or 3 years at least," he added.
Yet, for all its current dependence on the CTO calling the shots, Bajaj's COO Bhatt said the company
was "on a journey where we'd like the CMO to take over the technology aspects of marketing".
Already, its CMO Mody selects and deploys products of his own choice--some of which are unfamiliar
even to the CTO--in several other business functions such as the company's loyalty programs. "Our
company is increasingly seeing a handshake between technology and marketing," said Bhatt.
So, how is this brave new world of SaaS likely to affect the future of the organizational structures of
companies?
In all likelihood, there will be mini IT departments in each business line or unit and marketing people
will increasingly be armed with tech backgrounds, according to industry observers. Conversely, tech
professionals will be forced to immerse themselves in the business side of things. There may not even
be an IT department, they say, because core IT functions may have moved to specialist companies.
Meanwhile, the data center would have migrated to the cloud for management and maintenance.

For all of SaaS's impressive gains in India, there are some things to watch out for and issues that need
fixing.
Gartner's Padmanabhan noted that while the allure of SaaS is plug-and-play, localization challenges do
crop up. Moreover, a balance needs to be struck between customization and standardization.
It is important, said Padmanabhan, to also understand savings over a five-year period so one can
incorporate true data migration and grow scalably--otherwise the complications from a haphazard
technology plan are guaranteed to eat into savings accrued from SaaS.
Almost all companies that were consulted said global SaaS companies located in India needed more
depth in the services provided by industry players. "Sometimes you have to drag vendors to get things
done," said Misra.
Topics: Cloud: How to Do SaaS Right, Cloud, Enterprise Software, India, SMBs

About Rajiv Rao

Rajiv is a journalist and filmmaker based out of New Delhi who is interested in how new technologies,
innovation, and disruptive business forces are shaking things up in India.
Contact