SAAS ( Software as a Service) for one third of all of us ?

At a Salesforce launch in Mumbai last week, a Gartner forecast was quoted that one third of all software budgets in the Asia Pacific region by 2010 would be spent on SAAS applications rather than traditional packaged or bespoke custom software applications.

This trend if true, is a huge inflection point (to quote Intel founder - Andrew Grove) for the software industry globally.

More so for India which has been at the receiving end of IT and software jobs offshored from Western nations (the latest Businessweek article talks of 1.1 Million US IT Jobs being lost during the last 5 years).

Also, we in India have had the advantage (or mis-fortune ? ) of side-stepping entire technology cycles due to late adoption. (.e.g unlike the US, we really do not have a legacy base of mainframe systems as we moved straight into the client-server and PC platforms and are moving also into the mobile computing platforms at a faster pace.)

What would SAAS do to the Indian software, ERP industry and it's huge developer and consumer base ?

Expect many interesting and useful SAAS Indian applications over the next few years (including the ERP area) depoyable over both PC and Mobile Device platforms.

Also, I suspect the above one-third figure quoted by Gartner does not include monetizing of the huge volume of SAAS applications that are used free by you and me as consumers (Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Blogger and so on).