If you're an optimist you will see that the economic slowdown did come with a few blessings in disguise for enterprises. This was a time when companies decided to consolidate operations, become leaner in terms of shedding extra employees and put off a lot of their IT purchases to buy only those things that were urgent.

Yes, in a sense they were becoming frugal but a correction was wanting. And this was when companies began exploring different options that were cheaper and fulfilled their requirements at the same time. The same applied to their IT shopping lists. While some could be put on hold there were others that required immediate attention.

This is where offering solutions-as-services comes in. Increasingly, we now see this trend of offering a pay-as-you-use model among vendors, but one wonders whether there are many takers for this in India. The most common form, or most talked about in the recent past, of everything-as-a-service (EaaS) is software-as-a-service (SaaS) which has of late gained a lot of steam in India. The basic idea behind services-as- solutions is to offer an alternative to making heavy investments in hardware and software.

“When it comes to IT, increas-ingly everything is being made available as a service. Gone are the days when companies would have to invest in software licenses, hardware and headcount to simply keep the lights on,” said Jeremy Cooper, VP-Marketing, APAC, Salesforce.com.

Shedding more light on the trend of offering solutions-as-services, Frank Gens, Senior VP and Chief Analyst, IDC said, “An IDC survey of IT executives, CIOs, and their line of business (LOB) colleagues shows that cloud services are 'crossing the chasm' and entering a period of widespread adoption. IDC expects the cloud adoption trend to be amplified by the financial crisis. The cloud model offers a much cheaper way for business to acquire and use IT. In an economic downturn, the appeal of that cost advantage gets greatly magnified. This advantage is especially important for small and medium businesses (SMBs), a sector that will be key target in any plan for recovery.”

As mentioned, the benefits of this model are plenty. The client does not need to buy software and servers, they can just access it over the Internet and pay for what they use. This also eliminates the need to pay for IT upgrades and maintenance and the customer gets all the support they require through the service provider.

Offering solutions-as-services has evolved from the basic necessity to save costs. “The very genesis of SaaS (applications) and PaaS (platforms) was a simple question: Why are consumer applications so easy, but enterprise IT so hard? Our response to that question has now become the world's most popular CRM application, Salesforce CRM. For Salesforce.com, the evolution from SaaS to PaaS was driven by customer demands approximately three years ago. They were experiencing incredible success and cost savings from our SaaS-based CRM solutions and were 'desperate' to develop custom functionality and apps to deploy SaaS in other parts of the businesses. That is what gave birth to The AppExchange and Force.com,” explained Cooper of Salesforce.com.

“When it comes to 'IT', increasingly everything is being made available as a service. Gone are the days where companies would have to invest in software licenses, hardware and headcount to simply keep the lights on” Jeremy Cooper VP-Marketing, APAC, Salesforce.com	“SaaS makes sense for SMBs in the current economy. Most SMBs are cash-flow-financed instead of debt-financed, and the pay-as-you-go model lets them spend more money on service configuration than on capital costs” Ross Brown VP-Solution Partners, Microsoft

EaaS defined
The next time you pitch for a client who wants to upgrade their IT infrastructure, try offering them solutions-as-a-service. Small medium enterprises, retail, banking, BPOs and the government are booming segments in India. If we look at the kind of IT require-ments of their employees you will see that there is a lot that they have or want that they may not necessarily need. Customizing solutions as services for these segments is what will make you stand out.

By deploying EaaS you help your client decrease their dependency on hardware. All the applications are available for them in the cloud. And there is no dependency for accessing those applications from a particular hardware or certain location. Each user is provided with a username and password using which they are given access to the information in the cloud.

Salesforce has been pionee­ring its vision of 'No Software' for more than a decade and today more than 63,200 companies worldwide-including hundreds in India-login to www.salesforce.com, to manage their business and customer information. “They are not buying software. They are simply using an Internet browser and a monthly subscription model. That is the power of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing models,” stated Cooper.

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