With Chennai emerging as a Software as a Service (SaaS) hub, the big players in this space including Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshworks, Suresh Sambandam, founder and CEO of OrangeScape, and Krish Subramanian, founder of Chargebee, are putting together a conclave called SaaS Boomi.
The event will be held on January 18 and 19 and over 300 SaaS founders from across Asia-Pacific will participate.
Mr. Mathrubootham, one of the early players in the SaaS space, said a bunch of like-minded founders from Chennai, Bengaluru and Singapore came together to share deep operator knowledge in a trusted SaaS founders-only closed group. “That is SaaS Boomi for you. This is our #PayItForward contribution to the ecosystem. This is how great ecosystems like Silicon Valley were built,” he said.
According to Mr. Sambandam, the next focused evolution is happening around SaaS.
Solving problems
“There are many different kinds of problems we can solve if we assemble a homogeneous set of founders in one single place, the effectiveness with which we can successfully solve these problems will be high. The reason we are hosting this event in Chennai is because the city is already the SaaS capital of India,” he said.
This will be an exclusive, founder-centric event, flavoured by real conversations and meaningful networking. “We plan to make it immersive and deep, provide real learnings that can be quickly implemented by SaaS founders,” Mr. Sambandam said.
He added, “It will be great if the government can be instrumental in making recurring billing for SaaS products friction-free. The process to get exemption from the RBI regulation is very tough.”
“By default or design, Chennai has a great talent pool that is primed to do extremely well in SaaS,” Krish Subramanian said.
Chennai has evolved as the country’s SaaS Capital, boasting over 13,000 people in the workforce and over a billion dollars in revenue.
Talent pool
As of September 2018, Chennai’s SaaS sector has raised about $500 million in funding, with most big players generating more revenue than their funding. The talent pool is not just purely coders, but a well-rounded pool of product management, UX designers, inbound marketers, inside sales, and programming talent.
In 2018, Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami in a meeting, said his government would give a huge impetus to this sector to make Tamil Nadu a global SaaS destination. “The State government can partner with co-working spaces and start-up accelerators/incubators that already exist in Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai to conduct state-level hackathons to bring out the best talent,” Mr. Subramanian said. He also suggested that the government could incentivise large organisations to run incubation centres and nurture small technology product start-ups.
According to Gartner, Software as a Service (SaaS) holds the largest segment of the cloud market, and its revenue is expected to hit $ 85.1 billion in 2019, growing at a rate of 17.8% compared to the previous year.
