Leveraging SaaS to Stay Relevant in The New Economy

Disruptions during the last 24 months have caused much economic distress for India’s pulsating growth engine: the MSME sector. It employs over 110 million citizens, contributing around one-third to the national GDP. Nevertheless, this strategically vital sector has since been clawing a steady path back to recovery, capitalizing on the digitalization surge and affirmative policy thrusts. Accelerating the process is the proliferation of the Software as a Service or SaaS delivery model, allowing the Indian mid-market players to consume technology at scale and transform at speed. 

Empowerment at scale

SaaS makes the onboarding and adoption of cutting-edge technologies more meaningful for small and medium business entities. Especially for those operating across the Tire II and III cities and suburbs of India, characterized by lack of capital, inadequate technical expertise, and inherent workforce constraints. Rather than developing and deploying software solutions on-premise, with apparent ownership complexities, SaaS allows businesses to access a broad range of functions like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales Management, Enterprise Planning, Collaboration, Cybersecurity, and much more, as services over the cloud, using pay-per-use subscription. 

While the much lower upfront cost is a hard USP for a SaaS delivery model, Indian MSMEs are also hooked on its other benefits. Coupled with the country’s robust internet user base, ranking it only behind China, SaaS attributes like rapid solution deployment, easy accessibility, high scalability, and vendor-managed infrastructure seems ideal to level the playing field and give MSMEs a winning edge in the Indian business climate. It has only gained more contextuality amidst the pandemic allowing businesses to sustain operations and optimize expenses. 

Unsurprisingly, the Indian SaaS market is on a stride, slated to grow from $ 5.3 billion in 2020 to $ 42.2 billion in 2025. The reasons behind this impressive growth can only be perceived in the context of the values that SaaS brings for companies looking to attain operational agility. 

Streamlining business operations

As the definition of work undergoes a massive transformation in the New Normal, SaaS innovations help MSMEs migrate their operations to the cloud and cope with the changes. Business leaders use cloud-native solutions to steer, automate and govern workloads, both within and beyond their physical, institutional boundaries, with unimaginable visibility and control. The outcomes include keeping employees productive, collaborative, and focused, ensuring safe access to business applications and infrastructure, maintaining continuity across the value chain, sustaining the pace of innovation, and catalyzing greater stakeholder engagement.

Fostering an informed decision-making culture 

In this digital-first operational culture, data analytics also have a pivotal role in allowing MSME process owners to access on-demand visibility. Leveraging the right SaaS analytics partner, a business can harness the operational data into actionable insights to make impactful decisions, deliver better products/services, and compete confidently.   

Elevating customer engagement efforts

In the post-pandemic era, alongside the quality of the offerings, customer engagement has assumed a center stage in gauging business success, setting the imperative for the Indian MSMEs to differentiate based on their outreach strategies. The right customer engagement program can open up information goldmines to foster greater brand loyalty, build seamless purchase journeys, drive product/service innovation, improve customer lifetime value, and assert a more substantial market presence. Here SaaS solutions like cloud CRMs allow even small businesses to affordably unlock the power of seamless customer engagement with proven benefits like continuous lead monitoring, improved segmentation and targeting, real-time pipeline management, omnichannel engagement, customer data management, and much more.     

Bringing the SaaS advantage to India’s MSME ecosystem could not have been better timed. The cloud-hosted solutions across functions have given businesses the means to weather the storm and scale and compete at a global level in ways unforeseen due to technology and cost barriers. The SaaS revolution has indeed brought the spirit of change at the Indian industrial grassroots, gradually setting the platform that the country needs to springboard towards its destiny of building a $ 5 trillion economy.