| |October 201819CIOReviewCXO INSIGHTSSAAS IS REVAMPING THE IT INFRASTRUCTURE: Excerpts from an interview with Ajit Chandrasekharan, Director, Carnival infrastructure Pvt Ltd. 1. Cloud-based SaaS technology is revamping the IT infrastruc-ture of Companies. It was speculated that developing countries will greatly benefit from this technology. Do you see it happen-ing in India, especially in the SMEs sector?SaaS technology is making a revolutionary change in IT infra-structure and development, wherein clients are benefitted to pay in subscription and the solutions are customized to their require-ment. Companies who are not able to spend high on capex due to resources are most beneficial as they can get the same services like they have their own infrastructure. India which is the land of SMEs or start-ups, it's a big boon as they have to compete in their core business with others and without a proper IT infra-structure, it is not possible.2. Do you think Mid Segment and Small Businesses in India have the needed infrastructure to scale on the Cloud-based SaaS software?This is the most important feature of the SaaS technology where-in the small or medium business doesn't have to invest much to enjoy the software services, in SaaS, the software middleware, and the hardware is managed by the service provider and the companies pay as per usage on different models like subscrip-tion, license fees etc. Today many companies have put data warehousing to store data on cloud which can be rented; many service providers use this as the storage to serve the clients or have their own servers. In our case, we give the option to a client to host in their own infrastructure or on our servers or in third party premises.3. There are business functions that have greatly benefited with SaaS technology like Human Resource, Customer Relations, and ERP. How do you think it has transformed the business efficiency and what are the speculations about its further growth, what other sectors it is expected to cover? These sectors like HR, customer relations, ERP are one of the biggest assets for any organization to flourish but were difficult to focus as many specialized tools were not available or were not cost-effective or even ignored by many. With SaaS, these depart-ments have the benefit to evaluate their shortcomings and can implement resource planning tools for themselves and to their client services. Going forward now these departments are getting more integrated and many tools bind them to serve them with tools and data for their benefit, we too offer tools or software and hardware platforms, for example a leader in fashion wear is using our sales force tool which is integrated into their marketing divi-sion, finance, logistics, production etc which used to be earlier with multi mails or phone calls. This enables a faster and transparent pro-cess wherein even the customers of the client can see their updates or status of any require-ment. In short, going forward, the communi-cation across the organization will be as simple as a WhatsApp group communication. 4. There are multiple SaaS vendors available in the market offering their unique services for different enterprises needs. Is it a new challenge for companies to integrate all mul-tiple software? How do you think the integra-tion problem can be solved? SaaS is in its initial stages but IT-enabled soft-ware and tools are available for some time now, hence companies are in different stages and with many tools already in use. SaaS ven-
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