SaaS, the Past, Present and Future - A Continuum...

A View

The motivation behind this article(s) was to pen down some thoughts on the evolution of traditional enterprise/consumer products to true Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, from 1988 to 2020 and beyond. While subscription-based offerings like auto/equipment leases, telephone companies, cafeteria based health care services, clubs for leisure/travel, media/publications, shared vacation rentals,and more recently subscription plus pay per use healthcare/wellness services (Cure Fit, Healthify me), or more recently, men's grooming accoutrement platforms like Beardo, have been prevalent for long. In the software/hardware world it was a slower evolution from the traditional licensing model to a SaaS model driven by the democratization of technology (both hardware and software). This article attempts to provide an insight on the evolution of SaaS as a business model, both in the enterprise and consumer context by tracing trends over 30 years. The ultimate goal would be to get a several, notable SaaS thought leaders to help create a book that can in turn be taught as an elective to first year (fresh men) graduates in their undergraduate program.

Attempting to bring in the historical perspective of 30+ years in a short format article has been a challenge though in terms of covering all trends and technology/business shifts. The following graphic attempts to delineate trends in the context of the time line, which lends the core flow to the article. Some of the examples provided in the subsequent part of the article are more India-centric because this was intended to highlight startup growth in India influenced by global trends, as well as focus on offerings from India that were global in nature.

Figure 1.0: Time line of Technology trends and Impact on SaaS Evolution

Hardware Drove Software - The 80s

The mid-’80s up until the ’90s saw the evolution of back end office and business applications which were procedural in nature and the user experience was minimal.. Examples of these on the business side were accounting applications, which involved a lot of manual data entry. These evolved slowly into the early version of the accounting/sales-tracking/supply-chain-management packages for the enterprise. Early versions of Spreadsheet Products like the SuperCalc were being launched. The healthcare sector also had very rudimentary back office systems. The financial sector was probably the most advanced, but here too, the dependence was on mainframe and mid-range servers which were proprietary in nature. Most of these systems were typically mainframe centric, with standard rudimentary terminal interfaces due to infrastructure constraints. The late 80's saw a surge of technology democratization from the networking standards based offerings, standard operating systems, emerging database standards around relational data stores, new age languages like C, and C++, scripting languages, Perl, TCL/TK and associated development tools to ensure a rapid development cycle. In gearing up for new age development, the beginnings of smaller server side compute engines could be networked together to yield better results in comparison to mainframes.

Evolution

Project Athena, the Andrew DFS, the evolution of https: on the TCP/IP stack, were seminal works on the computer side by leading universities like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, UIUC, in tandem with DARPA. This resulted in the establishment of client-server technology. Bell Labs (AT&T) licensed its Unix OS, hardware companies like Apollo, Sun Microsystems, Sequent, Pyramid, and SGI, took advantage of this and were great examples of companies driving the client-server movement. IBM, HP and DEC also started participating with their offerings, however, some of these companies also had proprietary offerings such as IBM mainframes (MVS), Dec (VMS), and HP (Tandem). Companies like Xerox, and later Apple were pioneering the ideal human interface for interactive computers.

Personal Compute and Software

The emergence of a smaller footprint computing device, the Personal Computer (PC) was groundbreaking. The first versions of the PC were from IBM, with the OS/2 operating system. Very soon companies like Apple, Zenith, Atari and others contributed to the wave of consumer and small business related products that were released; This predominantly looked like a hardware world with a veneer of software offerings. However, companies like Microsoft, Intuit, Adobe, PlumTree, Lotus, Dbase, Access,WordPerfect, Development tools from Borland, Symantec, and others started putting out offerings on a smaller platform, i.e. the PCs. In fact, from the late 80s through the 90s there were thousands of product companies in this segment, with median prices ranging from $4.99 to $99. Developer tool offerings mostly focused on the personal productivity segment and SOHO market (small office/ home office). Microsoft focused on this segment and its flagship product, the Windows OS, and Windows Office (put together by acquisitions), pretty much became the de facto choice and continues to be so today. India’s flagship product Tally was one amongst the early successes, and continues to be a dominant enterprise product in the MSME segment.

Other Trends

The other trend was super-computing companies like Cray, which led to the formation of specialized software companies like Mathematica, MatLabs, SAS - all-powerful companies today in their own right. Surprisingly, these mainframe companies were already familiar with a SaaS business model, namely, time-sharing across multiple clients. So the pricing by usage model was being re-emphasized from the early timeshare concepts introduced by IBM, and others.

Concurrently, the IBM mainframe, HP Tandem, and DEC VMS offerings on the business side were also evolving. In both these instances the move towards a client server side offering was natural as it meant larger exposure of their software offerings, and more importantly, additional revenue streams.

Client Server Dominates - The late 80s, early 90s

As the client-server world based on TCP/IP kept evolving; Unix OS variants, databases, distributed computing standards (RPC/DCE) also evolved and gave rise to one of the largest, cooperative, democratic software movement; namely, OpenSource. This ensured a level playing field driven by standards. Anyone could pretty much download an entire stack and configure their own server, or network of servers and write applications on it. This had an impact on proprietary OS companies like IBM, HP, DEC, Apple, and a host of others, all for the better. Network giants like Cisco, Juniper Networks, NetApp, and others were emerging establishing themselves as the core infrastructure players alongside the traditional and new hardware vendors. Middleware offerings around relational database technologies like Oracle, Informix, DB/2, Ingres, Sybase, and others were popular data stores, and connectivity at the application/data level was carried out through product offerings like Rendezvous from TibCo, the MQ series from IBM, and several others. The attempt was to create a connected software environment within the enterprise. Today these messaging architectures have evolved, for example Kafka, Rabbit MQ, Apache MQ, and Kinesis from Amazon are a few of the popular offerings.

There was also the evolution of the data analytics and visualization stacks. Standalone companies like Informatica and Terradata were very successful,Oracle, IBM, MicroSoft had their own offerings. Today we have a whole slew of next generation offerings like Apache Spark, System R, SaS, QLikview and others

ETL offerings were also offered in tandem with the above with the notion of a data pipe-lining, warehousing, and analytics/visualization. In the ETL space we have offerings like Hevo, Sprinkle and others.

Amazon itself has a whole host of offerings like Kinesis, Redshift, QuickSight, EMR etc, all offered as pay per use services on their public Cloud. Other public cloud vendors have also developed similar stacks.

An Interesting Turn

Going back;remember the PC world? Formerly known as a desktop, and later called a laptop. That environment was also standardizing. Either you chose a Unix OS variant and its products, i.e. RedHat, Ubuntu, etc., or you had the Windows environment from Microsoft, and the AppleOS environment from Apple. In terms of numbers, these were dominant and several well-known companies like Intuit, Adobe, Autodesk, PlumTree, who were writing products for these platforms continued with desktop offerings. OS/2 as a desktop environment was mainly prevalent within the offices of large corporates.OS/2 did support its own large ecosystem of product companies. Products like Tally established themselves in India along with several desktop software products focused on word processing, databases, and ERP like offerings aimed at the MSME segment, Tally continues to dominate the MSME segment in India. Zoho incorporated in 1996, began its foray in the MSME segment with a focus on going global while focusing on frugal/impactful innovation. Both Tally and Zoho have continued to grow successfully despite changes in technology and the ups and downs of the economy. They are unique, in that, both have not raised any institutional capital and have focused on scaling profitably.

The evolution of developer tools around Java, JavaScript, HTML, Python; early container development, and deployment applications/products via application servers like Tomcat,WebLogic, OC4J, JBoss,Websphere, Pramati, and others. These products in turn would provide the basis for a new set of rudimentary online services. This trend continued to deliver the critical impetus that ensured that the internet was there to stay. The seeds of eCommerce platforms were sown, we started to see several sophisticated online service offerings that included support for online shopping catalogs, the preliminary notion of a shopping cart, placing an order online. The order processing however was a combination of online/offline processes, and very discrete and oftentimes broken.

In specific scripting languages (interpretive) like JavaScript, Python provided the impetus for rapid prototyping cycles on the client and server side. This is evidenced by the fact that we have several JavaScript frameworks on the client side, as well as the server side. This coupled with the rest based APIs, and popular server side components that included message queues, server libraries, specialized graph databases (neo4j) or graph querying languages (graphql), storage and other utilities, including containers, and orchestrated deployment ensured that all development and deployment had moved to the cloud! This is unlikely to change soon!

To quote a millennial hands on entrepreneur "JavaScript and client side scripting languages made it possible to reduce computing load from the server side by doing a substantial number of computations at the client side. Apart from the reduction in number of API calls, there was another benefit for the server to focus on executing complex business logic." The millennial is a consummate techie focused on data sciences, databases, AI/ML and systems in general. The proliferation of edge computing hardware has become more main stream implying that compute has indeed become distributed to the edge.

Today it is a world of micro services and its deployment and management. All public cloud providers are set up for this. The development, deployment and operations are all carried on the cloud platform. The pace at which some of the current generation cloud applications are developed, tested, deployed is mind boggling! It is all about continuous deployment!

The Early Advent of SaaS - Early 2000s

The internet was driving rapid infrastructure changes, server costs were going down, and basic servers had the ability to be aggregated to drive a lot of computing power. Networking standards had evolved so one could communicate securely over the WAN with efficiency and security. Companies like VMware, EMC, Citrix and others continued to focus on easily configurable virtualization of the hardware layers that provided virtual instances of various servers, which could be spun up on-demand, i.e. a precursor to elastic computing and storage. This was extended to complete server configurations that would have both hardware and software. IBM and other established vendors would also start offering bare metal server with a virtualization layer that allowed orchestrated provisioning.

Fat Clients?

Fat clients were passé, it was all about the browser and thin clients, evolving client side scripting standards security. The development tools, languages, and deployment were also changing, the word DevOps would become popular later. This gave rise to several digital-only new companies like Hotmail.com, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Rightworks, Junglee, Google and many more. These were service offerings that catered to online savvy customers, and were driven by attractive pricing models. Enter the ‘try and buy Freemium services’ and ‘paid subscription for more features’ model which implied that SaaS as a business model was getting established.

Companies like Netflix, SalesForce, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Box, DropBox, and others focused on the evolving internet offerings/standards, raising capital and launching service platforms that catered to both the consumer and businesses (though initially small), these companies did very well and continue to do so. This era was also known as the ‘dotcom boom’, where many more companies were born, though several went defunct within a couple of years. Established companies like Sun MicroSystems, Silicon Graphics, Compaq, and others suffered too; many of them ended up being acquired.

IT Services - A Morph?

About the same time, service companies like Accenture, CGI, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, were launching digital transformation services with COEs focused on building service-oriented architecture leveraging SOAP, WSDL etc., which would be the forerunner of today's micro-services architecture; This evolution then forced the evolution of rest of the APIs with an extensible, name/value pair data exchange format (jSON), a far cry from the days of the RPC, and having to pre-calculate the size and type of data to be exchanged. Data exchange was secure, thanks to the evolving https standards.For those who do remember, it was a heterogeneous world out there, where the old world met with the new, and integrated workflows across these 2 worlds were evolving.

Companies like Postman, Hasura, AeroSpike Community Edition, MongoDB, PostGres, IQlect, and a host of others have leveraged this brilliantly in today's fast-paced development cycle world. The idea was to build lightweight frameworks and deliver rapid solutions that were more internet or browser oriented, driven by encapsulation of previous generation software APIs, in a loosely or tightly coupled architecture. This allowed extended offerings for the consumers of the enterprises, simple offerings like a help desk, good examples here are Zen Desk, and Fresh Desk, or inquiry services driven from a catalog view, or any formatted data store view; most ecommerce sites have perfected this. The interesting thing about the business model was it was tending towards outcome-based pricing, in effect, a variant of the SaaS business model.

Specialization of IT Services

IT services and product companies like Persistent, Global Logic, Globant, Scient, RazorFish were working with companies like Amazon, MSFT, VMware, Google (early versions of GCP) and Salesforce (Force.com) with their cloud offerings, and in parallel building out "born on the cloud" product offerings as a partner for several startups; at one point some of them were working with several hundred startups concurrently, most of them from the valley (Bay Area) - All great sources of learning and evolution, for these service companies. The pricing here was in terms of a revenue share or equity over and above the cost, a result oriented pricing model.   

Continued SaaS Momentum

With this focus on flexible requirements, it was but natural that most cloud platforms veered towards a SaaS model and the startup or new offerings built on these platforms had to be aligned and empowered appropriately. Just like Python, JavaScript's impact on the client/server side scripting, data was a focus. Data, being a critical source of any business, has been a central component of any enterprise application. Managing data has changed in myriad forms from flat files to in-memory storage engines. In between came RDBMS, SQL and NoSQL databases, key-value, document oriented databases. like AeroSpike, MongoDB, Neo4J, Jersey, PostGres. File system stores - DFSs - like Hadoop, GFS (peripherals or add-ons like HIVE, Zookeeper). Evolution of newer dev stacks from the original LAMP stack to MEAN, MERN, MEVN, Flutter (cross web development), client side frameworks like react.js, next.js, mobile frameworks that are ionic react based.

Server-less offerings (AWS Lambda). etc. Utilities for search like Solr, Elastic, and Streaming utilities for data, video, audio, availability of easy API, integrations (mainly REST) where everything is now API accessible and measurable on a usage basis. Platform services for Data, data as a platform like QuBole and several others evolved. On the data visualization front, we have offerings like Tableau, and Fusion Charts, the latter is a completely bootstrapped SaaS company from India, with tremendous momentum and great customer feedback.

Help desk platforms like Zen Desk, and Fresh Desk (now called Freshworks) from India are great examples of enterprise SaaS offerings.Most SaaS offerings leverage data by making use of machine learning models combined with heuristics (AI) to fine tune use cases for enterprises. Horizontal AI as a service platfoms like OpenAI, Pachyderm etc. allow for the use of models as a building block.

The DevOps evolution has also matched up with the above development/product enhancements - Puppet, Salt, custom scripts, container technology (Docker, Kubernetes - Mayadata etc.)

The next generation SaaS startups focus on product offerings for today's online businesses. Products like Magento, Shopify, Marketo, PipeDrive, MoEngage, Clever Tap, MixPanel, Peelworks, and many others like Xenoti, DarwinBox, Vyomo, Whatfix, have all focused on the SME segment with subscription-based pricing models and have scaled well!

Social platforms like Quora, Twitter, Koo, Instagram, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram are extremely popular. Newer offerings like Discord, Handshake, LunchClub, Leher, ClubHouse are also gaining popularity, these cater to specific online interaction models.

Product offerings around analytics services, next-generation middleware like OpenESB, JBoss ESB, MuleSoftESB and custom data stores, payment gateways, security add-ons and other building block compute services are becoming more mainstream. Some products solve point problems i.e.,analytics in specific verticals related to pricing, demand forecasting, marketing automation, data backup services, devops services, data visualization, search services, data as a platform, etc. Several of these offerings were aimed at the consumer directly. Some of these offerings are leveraging open source technology components and bringing in data driven decision making that subsumes machine learning, and artificial intelligence, as a key differentiating factor.

Robot Process Automation (RPA) products offerings were also leveraging NLP, ML components to provide platforms that could be customized to online offerings within enterprises looking to implement better work flows that seamlessly included the ecosystem of the enterprise, employees, customers to drive better operational efficiency. This segment has garnered a lot of investor interest recently, for example, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Pega, UI Path and others.

These above product offerings on the cloud platforms had varying degrees of success, given their dependence on the cloud vendor platform for outreach; this is still an issue and continues to be solved gradually. 

Dev/DevOps in the SaaS world- Small Teams Big Achievements

Spotify is a great example of how a small team could achieve tremendously. Launched in 2008 from Stockholm Sweden, today it is a premium provider of quality audio content customized to users across the globe, they have adapted to the fast paced world by being organized as pods, tribes, chapters across tribes, and charters. They have more than a 100 plus modules that are easily configurable/deployable. They embody the need of today's digital world - driving innovation contnuously. The original development team was only 40 strong, which emphasizes the need for smart reuse and optimization of existing resources, call it, Agile++. Spotify now caters to 40 plus embedded clients, be it in car consoles, airline consoles, mobiles tablets, in addition to the various web formats, the audio quality is intense, and can match the best digital players.

Zoom, the latest video/audio conferencing platform has taken the world by storm, their market cap today is $140B; thanks to its intuitive, easy to use interface, friendly pricing policy, lightweight clients. Once again, a focused small development/product team was able to deliver against deadlines that were very ambitious. Remember, they have been successful despite a plethora of communication products including established ones like Skype, Microsoft Messenger, Cisco's WebEx, Citrix's GotoMeeting, MicroSoft's Team suite, Google's Hangout/Meet etc! You will see many more forays into already established segments like healthcare, insurance, finance, education to begin with. New players will continue to emerge, namely, Airmeet, Nunify, Zuddl.

Private Cloud Offerings - A Key Driver viz. Public Cloud Offerings - mid 2000-2010

Companies like SalesForce, Netflix, Box, Amazon, ServiceNow, WorkDay who evolved from a private cloud infrastructure also had a huge impact on the establishment of the SaaS business model; In essence, SaaS as a business model was now mainstream! Traditional ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle where also attempting SaaS offerings. Microsoft launched its Office 360 on Azure.

It is important to highlight Netflix and Torrent, both of whom solved the scale/reliability problem brilliantly by leveraging general purpose compute sources. They created an optimized infrastructure platform that could scale on demand, with very little degradation, elements of these have made their way into the public cloud offerings from AWS (Amazon), Azure, Google’s Cloud Platform and others. Torrent was all about super speeds for optimizing downloads, which was relevant to Netflix as well as other providers, these pioneering efforts have benefited the cloud community tremendously.

The Mobility Angle: The Real Turbo Boost! - 2010

This was the shot in the arm that catapulted both startups, and cloud platforms into the next wave of mobile-first products/platforms. The development cycles were accelerated, thanks to frameworks and coding standards. The mobile world was largely polarized into the IoS and the Android (including variants). Internet majors like Google and Facebook now viewed mobility as an integral part from an infrastructure perspective. This also impacted the velocity of mobile-only apps, and shared-revenue models with the various app stores. In addition to this, several web products introduced their mobile clients to both, native and mobile web modes. This also saw a major push of a partnered revenue (business) model either through lead generation or click-through transactions, in a way pushing for more usage. The mobile revolution was also very much aligned to a SaaS business model (usage and engagement driven models).

UI/UX - The Difference - Today!

The lines between sales and product support and every function in between is now a blur and the product cycle is continuous, agile and supports near real time devops models. This called for rapid interaction on the prototyping of features with customer experience becoming a critical theme. This in turn caused a mini revolution of sorts, design thinking and visualization came to the fore. Tools and products for designers evolved, and became very sophisticated. To paraphrase a gaming example, we have come a long way from the days of Hangman to PuBG. AR/VR approaches to inherent design will create enhanced interfaces for the consumer and their interaction spheres! Today the organizations have evolved into product teams that entail marketing, design, engineering, devops, support, along with critical elements of operations. Thanks to the JavaScipt revolution one has access to some cool frameworks like NextJS, Angular, Bootstrap and others. Designers also need to understand some back end code to ensure holistic UX implementations.

Academia: A Digression

Making the transition from the working world, i.e., being an entrepreneur and executive, to academia, by helping IIT Bhubaneswar and other new IITs to set up their CS program was interesting, as was being a full-time Professor for 2 years. While traditional courses like Programming and Data Structures, Programming Languages, Systems (OS, etc.), and Algorithms were easy to teach. The course on Software Engineering, however, was tricky. Most existing content referred to the old world, and content related to the new world was very disorganized and unstructured. Combining these two distinct views into a course outline with interesting mini-projects was very time consuming, but rewarding. It was due to more than 300 students who were able to assimilate the material and give good, real-time feedback. I would like to thank each and every one of them. The Software Engineering course also included aspects emphasizing the continuity between sales, product marketing, management, engineering, customer success; a view that would prepare the students better viz. a work environment in the future. The mobile angle introduced newer/subtle dimensions around agile, visual design, and rapid prototyping!  

The software engineering course was modified to support online interactive sessions with a professional network in the industry in order to seek real-world content, mini-projects, guest lectures, etc. This worked and benefited the small ecosystem of mentors, content providers, and the students as a whole. This ecosystem would also result in a lot of online education tech plays like ByJu'ss, Vedantu, Unacademy,TalentSprint, Toppr, WhiteHat Jr, Simplilearn and many others. There is a need to leverage better forms of group learning, co-curricular, activity based learning, most of the afore-mentioned platforms are not geared that way, and could lead to student/teacher and parent fatigue, a very critical aspect of online learning - i.e., "please DO NOT push anything aggressively, let it happen gradually".

SaaS and the Venture World... - 2005+

Post life in Academia, the Venture world beckoned. With three startup experiences, hands-on technology expertise, exposure to working enterprise products, exposure to leadership roles in the technology world, would it be an easy transition? No! This world was different! One had access to a lot of data; the decision-making process was a lot more deliberate, rightfully so, and mostly resulted in a lot of decisions in the negative. Saying no to proposals was not easy!

In all my previous avatars, I had very little data and need to make quick decisions while building out a business operations or product who ether either in a startup or within larger organizations. Venture investing needed a lot of careful introspection combined with an intuitive feel for the space, and decision making needed to be slow and deliberate. This was very different from angel investment, or building a product where you are the primary decision-maker, and can go largely with your gut feel. For comfort, our focus was on Enterprise Tech SaaS plays, and we were exposed to some really good companies, some which we invested in, and some which we passed for good OR not so good reasons. Companies like Innovaccer, Postman, Hasura, IQlect, DarwinBox, Edge Networks, Seclore, MoEngage, Whatfix, Zapstitch (now part of Freshworks) Haptik (now part of Times Internet), Niki.ai, Vernacular.ai, ParallelDots, Active.ai , Locale.ai, Calm.io, Minjar (Dev Ops), Zagg.network, Stezy.io, CognitoChain, Zebi (Blockchain), and many others. While doing this, we were exposed to a lot of B2B and B2C platforms where one had to evaluate the technology, team, road map, etc; essentially diving deep to ensure that what was being said indeed existed, some of these platforms included ShopClues, BigBasket, LivSpace, Gozefo, Taxi4Sure, SnapDeal, Housing.com and others in the adtech space like Komli, Inmobi, Pubmatic, media, and others in the gaming space (Dream11, Nostragamus), fashion (Roposo, Fabulyst), food (Goli Vada Pav, GoliSoda, The Thickshake Factory), travel, and hospitality space (MakeMyTrip, RedBus, ClearTrip). There was a pattern that was emerging, i.e., the platform plays were evolving into efficient frameworks to build out ecosystems by bringing all the relevant actors together, i.e consumers, producers, distributors, suppliers in a unified SaaS business model. Could this be the future? The media and entertainment segments were also very proactive in this context, companies like InMobi were very successful with their pub sub model viz online interactive advertising. Google, with its platform was actually killing it, and today along with Facebook, they account for more than 50% of the online advertising revenues globally.

Evolving SaaS Patterns

The patterns of a new set of SaaS offerings were beginning to emerge from India, like Housing.com, Nestaway, Roomys (Real estate), SimpliLearn, iNurture, BYJUs, Toppr, TalentSprint, Vedantu (Edtech); eCommerce plays like Shop Clues, SnapDeal, Amazon which were all evolving market places; Today we see specialized eCommerce platforms catering to fashion accessories. DocsApp, eKincare (Health tech), Goflytta.com (employee mobility/work from home solutions), LogisticsNow (data-driven Logistics), AIBono, NinjaKart (Agritech). Zomato and Swiggy are leaders focused on food delivery, even though they started at different ends of the ecosystem, i.e consumers, restaurants, order processing, in-house versus out-of-house production, logistics, payments (revenue sharing), and the notion of a platform fee or subscription for certain categories of consumers and partners. This pattern was here to stay.

Let us take the example of an Employee Mobility and WFH (work from home) company, GoFlytta.com. Their platform is custom-tailored to deal with employees (consumers), employers, partners (curated/rated list of packers, transporters), billing, and insurance cover for the artifacts involved in the move, be it a physical address to move to or a work from home environment.

Figure 2: The GoFlytta Business Services Architecture (C) GoFlytta Pvt Ltd

GoFlytta has received a lot of inbound inquiries regarding their platform, because of the success they have seen in the first instantiation viz. India around employee mobility and related solutions.

Another example, LogisticsNow, is building a data-driven logistics platform that subsumes traditional transporters and next-gen transporters like BlackBuck, Rivigo and others. Logistics is emerging from the shadows to merit the World's focus, especially post COVID-19. And in the new normal, some emerging platforms make logistics digital and democratic. LoRRI, LogisticsNow's platform has emerged as the platform of choice working with over 550 transporters, to enable logistics intelligence. This implies an inherent need for optimization of the logistics budget(s) for enterprises through a data-driven selection of transporters and other supporting algorithms for route optimization.

LoRRI straddles both demand and supply, builds efficiency for both sides, while ensuring a sustainable smart data-driven ecosystem for the industry. Government organizations and the industry need such platforms to reach out to consumers (citizens), especially in difficult times when food,vaccines, and other essentials are critical to winning the war on COVID-19. LogisticsNow also has been getting inbound inquiries from traditional businesses in Logistics for its LoRRI platform.

Figure 3. Pan India view of a Digitized Transporter ecosystem (C) LogisticNow

Other Examples of Platforms Plays

eKincare is another example of a platform addressing the needs of actors in the Digital Health ecosystem. RedBangle is the latest evolving platform play in the media and entertainment space, an earlier startup called Yoghurt Labs was also addressing this space. Paratilipi is a leading platform for regional content. Vuze was attempting to create a similar platform in the news space, other online news like News in Shorts, Daily Hunt, News in Shorts are also evolving in similar directions. The Urban Company, formally UrbanClap, has created a very cool platform eco system for home related services across major metros, they have got the formula of utilization, customer satisfaction, pricing right, and have scaled to all major metros, they could license their platforms to partners to expand their global footprint - that would be a natural evolution. Livspace is another great platform play for interior designers/decorators, suppliers and end customers, they have seen tremendous traction.

!Dr.S. Vidhyashankar's ex Times internet, and currently with 9 star media has this to say about the evolving media segment: “The digital economy is a driving force, and the News Media industry is one among the most disrupted sectors. Globally, The New York Times and the Washington Post have been flag bearers of digital innovation in News Media for a long time. Their vision and sense of change in news audiences have borne fruit in multiple ways -NYT celebrated the addition of 583000 new subscribers in the last quarter totaling 6 million strong and growing”.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon invested in the iconic news brand WaPo, subsequently WaPo has embraced the technology driven growth leading to ARC publishing, a full stack enterprise suite from WaPo’s technology team that is being made available to other publishers. 

As always, data driven intelligence driving content is the pivotal innovation - the capability to analyze readership/viewership data on the fly and drive click-baits or engagement with the audience is the name of the game. Intense multi variate testing to identify suitable headlines for the target audience or running live dashboards to analyze user preferences in driving virality is crucial to winning in today’s era of multi-screen distraction, content glut and false information!

An innovation ecosystem that solves content issues, enables access and helps monetize subscription/advertising revenue is a need of the hour to a struggling news media industry where the print medium is already on its way down. Yourstory has done a great job in focusing on technology, and entrepreneurs, and continues to scale. There is room for specialized content in bytes. In Shorts, and Daily Hunt are other online news plays in India with great traction.

Licensing Platforms?

If platform plays are done right, the platform(s) themselves can be licensed to several large customers and partners in the same segment, globally. For example, a few of the above companies are already getting inbound inquiries, however, in the investment world, this is still a big NO NO!. This will surely change, albeit slowly. 

With the intent of transitioning some new startups into a real SaaS Play, there are a few platform companies that I have had the chance to mentor that look promising. There is already an evolving product DNA that these platform companies have. They are easily at par with the traditional enterprise SaaS companies.

Traditional SaaS Plays will also Continue

Pausing to reflect; pure horizontal technology plays that are consumer/enterprise-oriented are still going to happen. Newer technology offerings will still be launched with great effect, especially in the space of developer platforms, DevOps, database, middleware, client-side frameworks, security, etc. However, there is the confidence that the platform plays that are solving niche or broader problems for the consumers/ businesses will evolve as a whole or in parts, into next-generation SaaS plays. Strangely enough, the OpenSource initiatives like GNU, OSF, Apache are great examples of a secure platform that caters to producers, consumers, enterprises with built-in quality. So are content platform plays, entertainment, and gaming plays. Each of these segments has a few of these platform plays already evolving. This platform itself needs to be instantiated once, scaled, and refined; India is a great backyard for this. There is optimism that we shall see some great forays from this slightly differentiated lens in the SaaS world. Remember Facebook, Google, Amazon are both in essence,platform plays; Apple and Microsoft are also becoming big platform players, and together these companies have a cumulative cash balance in excess of $650B.

New SaaS products will emerge in the context of 5G and superior compute architectures, IOT platforms will continue to evolve. Ecvinox, Morphing Engines, Bit Silica,Alpha IC, Cron Systems are great examples of compute power on the edge, combined with throughput of 5G and the cloud you will see many cool SaaS offerings in the education, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and agriculture verticals..

Factors to Consider viz. Platforms

If the above trends become the norm, there are some interesting aspects to consider. How does one create a revenue model which is SaaS and deals with enterprises adopting the platform, i.e., fees and transactions? Or how do you run the platform in different geographies and with different partners, which could entail SMEs, and their respective consumer ecosystem? How would traditional consulting and service companies serving the enterprises transform to platform-related services by partnering with platform plays, how would these impact revenues?

How would investors look at the above, will they change from the current view of making a platform play successful, versus using the first instantiation to create a new revenue stream which may have fewer customers, but are equally scalable, and eventually more valuable because of profits?, Why? - because they have already cracked the aspects the consumer "viral effect" through that critical first instantiation, at scale. How would the entrepreneurs deal with this transition? 

A platform play as a quasi-product requires a very disciplined approach and platform sales are time-consuming which needs a very different approach based on the vertical, the geography, and partners.

Overall, it may not be a boxed SaaS product world anymore, one has to be more flexible as an entrepreneur or investor in navigating issues of scale and delivering real value. The continuum has arrived and will evolve - leading to some very interesting and disruptive solutions.