ISV Summit & Awards 2020 Fortifies India’s Vision to become Global SaaS Powerhouse

The 5th Edition Saw Record Participation with over 1200 Attendees

The India’s largest thought-leadership platform for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) offered expert insights and directions for building strategies for fund-raising, skill development and go-to-market as they prepare for their journey to become global SaaS organizations

The ISV Summit and Awards 2020, pegged as the largest congregation and thought-leadership platform to build a strong ISV Community in India, has recently concluded its flagship fifth edition. Organized for the first time virtually due to COVID-19 pandemic, the summit saw record participation from over 1200 ISVs, SaaS Providers, Solution VARs, MSPs, Tech Leaders, and IT OEMs.

Organized by Techplus Media, the leading new-age and disruptive B2B marketing technology media house, the industry’s premier ISV event not only deliberatedon the challenges faced by SaaS businesses but also offered directions on the customers’ software priorities and expectations, GTM strategies and ISV success stories.

The phenomenal success of the ISV Summit underlined the fact that during the COVID-19 pandemic Digital Transformation has emerged as the real saviour as businesses re-invent their processes and go-to-market strategies to remain relevant for the customers. The event highlighted that ISVs are the real agents of Digital Transformation and recognized their ardent endeavour to innovate and deliver customer experience.AsIndia’s share in the global SaaS market is expected to triple over the next 5 years, ISVs will play a crucial role in taking the software development to the next level. As per market estimates, India is likely to become a $10 billion revenue industry with an eight percent share of the global SaaS revenues by 2025.

The summit commenced with an exciting opening keynote on critical insights to address challenges in the fund-raising process from Professor Thillai Rajan, Department of Management Studies, IIT Madras. He said that angel investors’ investment preferences are dynamic; hence, their past investment patterns cannot be used as a guide to determine their future investment preferences. “Even though an entrepreneur is targeting the right investor, the inertia on the part of the investor has to be overcome before one can start getting attention. The best way to break open the inertia is to approach it very systematically, as it brings with it a certain amount of force to overcome the inertia barriers. A systematic approach signifies passion to the venture, which is very much appreciated by the investors,” explained Rajan.

Further, Girish Mathrubootham, Founder & CEO, Freshworks, in his guest keynote, stressed on the need to ignore few advises in order to come out successfully on our vision and mission. He revealed that many people advised them to move out of Chennai during their earlier days and few recommended them to move to Silicon Valley as they became a $54 million company. “However, we were passionate to build the world-class company from India. In fact, the successful execution of India’s Mission Mars in the first attempt encouraged us to believe in ourselves and build a global, $1 billion revenue product company from India. Silicon Valley is regarded for the talent availability; hence our mission is to create the talent pool in the country. This led us to open up the Freshworks Playbook to deliver courses and mini-mentoring programs,” said Mathrubootham while elaborating on his success story.

“We are extremely happy to say that we are seeing emergence of global SaaS start-ups from India. In fact, the next wave of software product companies is coming our way,” he added.

The summit witnessed a thought-provoking panel discussion on theNew Software Priorities of 2020 for CIOs and their Expectations from SaaS Companies. The panel moderated by Feroz Khan, Partner & Head, Digital Advisory, KPMG India, consisted of industry leaders including Prasanna Lohar, Head, Digital, Innovation and Architecture, DCB Bank; Sunil Kumar Pandey, Professor and Director (IT), Institute of Technology and Science, Ghaziabad; and Pooja Chatrath, CIO, Cryoviva Biotech. While starting the discussion, Khan noted that SaaS is witnessing uptake from emerging organizations because of their scalability and the way licensing is designed. “While many organizations have started using SaaS beyond CRM, CMS and payrolls, there are still many businesses which are reluctant to move their core applications on the cloud.”

Pandey added that while SaaS plays critical role in accessibility, scalability and cost reduction for the organizations, most of them are concerned about data, security and industry-specific solutions. “However, COVID-19 has proved to be a great level player. It has made organizations realize the importance of cloud and SaaS in order to keep their business up and running,” he stated.

Highlighting the SaaS adoption in the BFSI segment, Lohar said that most of the banks are opting for the cloud-ready non-core applications as they slowly move towards cloud. “Everything is now customer-driven. Customer demand has given rise to neo-banking organizations like PhonePe and Paytm, which are using APIs of the banks to deliver highly personalized and innovative services.Traditional banks are already invested a lot on core banking applications and IT infrastructure, which makes their cloud journey slow. However, few of the newer banks are investing on cloud-ready core banking solutions,” detailed Lohar.

During his remarkablesession on marketing tips and go-to-market strategy for emerging SaaS organizations, Prasenjit Roy, CMO, NTT Netmagic, highlighted that businesses need to follow Minimum Viable Product/ Minimum Viable Marketing strategy to keep disasters at bay. “Don’t waste time and money on building full-fledged features of your SaaS product. Instead, create a video message with benefits and features of the SaaS product that you plan to develop. If required, you may develop 20 percent of the must-have features and test them in the market. However, go back to the drawing board if the ratings are below 8/10,” shared Roy.

He further stressed on the importance of digital marketing and advised to focus on SEO, Google search, thought leadership quotient, online video content, email marketing and Internet banner ads. “Companies with aggressive social media marketing and mobile-first approach are finding success faster than their traditional counterparts. However, everything boils down to the customer experience (CX). As per Gartner, 80 percent of businesses would primarily compete on the basis of enhanced CX. The differentiation between product and services are declining as CX leads the decision making with elements like personalization, integrity of the company, expectations, resolution with customers, empathy, and time and effort to minimize customer efforts,” he detailed.

Roy however cautioned that businesses must not fall in love with their products or its features; instead, should love their customers and listen to their feedback.

In his appealing session on Techplus Media’sunique initiative to strengthen ISV community through Aatmnirbhar Bharat project, Anand Sharma, Executive Director, TechPlus Media, highlighted that the country iswitnessing an unprecedented time not only because of the pandemic but also due to Atmanirbhar Bharat and ‘Vocal for Local’ initiatives of the government. “As the leading B2B marketing technology media organization, we have been the preferred partner of large enterprises for their marketing projects. We provide services like marketing consulting and thought leadership as well as sales enablement and account-based marketing with our immense intelligence gathered on IT landscape. To further fortify the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, we are offering marketing services consultation to Indian ISVs at zero cost and all of our services at flat 50 percent discount,” said Sharma. He concluded that the initiative will be a game-changer for emerging software businesses in India.

The summit concluded in a scintillating evening of celebrations and recognitions with the much coveted ISV Innovation Awards. The ISV Innovation Awards are Techplus Media’s initiative to acknowledge the best ICT solutions by ISVs, system integrators, VARs, and MSPs across the country. The award ceremony recognized the top ISVs under 58 categories, leading system integrators and VARs in 50 categories, top VADs under 10 categories and leading IT vendors under 35 Partners’ Choice categories.

The ISV Summit and Awards was  supported by Citrix as presenting partner; Cisco Cloud as the cloud partner; Veeam and Hewlett Packard Enterprise as supporting partners; Beehive, Klassify, ProcMate, 3i Infotech, YNOS, Futurenet, and Somnetics as SaaS partners; as well as ISODA, Gesia, ASIRT and PCAIT as Association partners.