As per the article Public cloud gains momentum in India, cxotoday.com finds from Gartner "the biggest segment of the market is Software as a Service (SaaS), having 36 percent of the total cloud service market. Out of the 233 billion INR that will be spent on cloud computing between 2013 and 2017, 89 billion INR will be spent on SaaS"

E-readiness/broadband penetration plays an important role for SAAS. It would be futile to focus on geographical segments, where Internet connectivity is still, a bottleneck.

As published in Track.in, according to 2010 statistics, 10 million broadband subscribers are active in India, of which Maharashtra leads the list with over 1.8 million subscribers followed by Tamilnadu (1.3 million) and Karnataka (1.13 million). Kerala has the highest broadband density with 0.7 million subscribers.

These 15 segments (states) could be ideal destinations to pitch in for SAAS

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for 80-90% of the Indian SAAS business, today. By considering the typical business culture and geography of India, segment specific sales models could augment the acquisition process. If we plan segments based on nature of business, 9 segments could be created across India.

The average selling price and sales model are interdependent as far as sales growth is concerned. When target a large segment with a simple tool, low selling price with self service sales model would be suitable.

When target a very small segment, self service sales approach may not be suitable. We may need to adopt transactional sales and if the tool is complex, then enterprise model. However in both the cases, it would be risky to go with low average selling price.

Business support applications may be showcased across segments. However for tools like help desk, point of sale, ecommerce platform etc., service providers may further focus on specific segments.

Wondering ! what could be the base of this sort of segmentation. Continue reading more on this and feel free to share comments.