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Jamcracker to redefine Software Business

Delivering software, applications as also services, on-demand and ask for payment of a bit of software or application, you use but not the whole suite of software is just a novel concept and a new business line altogether. This could easily enable the large enterprises to save huge cost which is very badly needed these days. In layman’s parlance, we can call this as an online superstore for software and applications or technically we can call it Software as a Service (SaaS). Though SaaS is not a new terminology, it did not have much impact. However, the time has changed and SaaS has actually reached its second avatar and the third and the largest wave is now building on the horizon – as SaaS continues to evolve toward becoming a platform for mission-critical application workloads. However, many user and vendor organizations are still struggling to understand the impact of SaaS on their business, their customers, and markets in general.

In order to know more about the SaaS trend in India and the role of Jamcracker Inc.,

VARIndia spoke to Steve Crawford, Vice-President – Marketing, Jamcracker Inc., and Lakshmi Narayan (Lux) Rao, Associate Director – Marketing, Europe and Asia-Pacific, Jamcracker Inc.

“How about a platform that not only enables traditional software application to be offered in an on-demand fashion, but also allows the services to be aggregated and catalogued? So far, the possibility is least. But this is where“‘Jamcracker’ comes in and can help the end-users through a delivery mechanism to pay on a monthly or weekly plan for the software and applications rather than paying the one-time licence fee,” says Steve.

“Towards this, we can help the VARs and SIs also to evolve themselves,” he adds. “A tremendous amount of automation is needed by SMBs which demand huge amount on buying software and this is where we can see the huge opportunity of deploying our services,” says Lux. It is the visionary idea of KB “Chandra” Chandrashekar, who envisioned the creation of an infrastructure that would allow organizations to consume application whenever they needed it. Founded in 1998, its objective is to provide flexibility for organizations to turn the application on and off with the business application being offered by telecom and IT service providers directly over the Internet.

This visionary idea ultimately became the model for Application Service Providers (ASPs) and Software-as-a Service (SaaS). Chandrasekhar made an early bet that the on-demand sector would create a big opportunity for channel players. It has been a long wait, but finally the on-demand sector is getting big enough for his vision to pay off— and in the meantime the company has had ample an opportunity to redefine its products and expertise.

The SaaS market is not only for SMBs but even the large enterprises are considering implementation of Apps such as CRM, HRMs, etc. It is also in the process of branching out of the core CRM segment to other application market. The primary factor that is driving SMEs to adopt SaaS application is cost benefit, followed by ease of use and business benefits. Basically, this on-demand service is 75 per cent business adoption, 25 per cent annual growth rate and 30 per cent of all software.

Jamcracker believes that the JSDN (Jamcracker Service Delivery Network), which is a showcase of loads of wholesale application that could be rapidly deployed by service providers on their service delivery network, will help kick-start channel involvement in the on-demand space because it brings together a pre-certified catalogue of on-demand applications and hosting providers that channel partners can draw on, relieving them of the burden of researching and testing a range of suitable services for themselves.

Steve says, “In India, there are many ISVs who are developing applications and they are not able to market the solutions, here comes Jamcracker which can help them to provide a global market. They can upload their applications on to Jamcracker site and can get a wide ranging takers sitting in a single place. On the other hand, Jamcracker is also speaking to the major telecom providers who can really be the delivery mechanism to the end-customers.”

According to Steve, in India, they are speaking to both the organizations on the one side the ISVs and on the other the telecom providers and the feedback is very exciting. Corporates like Microsoft, McAfee, Motorola, Thomas International, etc. are the solution partners of Jamcracker.

When asked about why to prefer Jamcracker, Steve said, “It is because of the scalability, flexibility and the profitability we offer. Stretching more upon these points, he said by ‘scalability’ we mean broad portfolio of on-demand service solution and robust technology with proven operations and support capabilities. By’‘flexibility’, we mean quick time-to-market with new value-added services and rapid response to changing industry and competitive dynamics. Last but not the least, by ‘profitability’, we mean increase revenues from existing network and services investments, increase customer retention and profitability, with low risk and cost.”

Slide 12 impo to go… Lux adds, “We mainly focus on two models. In the first phase of the project, partners will strike individual relationships with on-demand vendors or hosted service providers. The next stage will be to build a live network of shared services.