With this offering, enterprise solutions can be made available for use by companies as and when required or ‘on demand.’

According to NIIT, IT consulting firm Gartner has prediced that by 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of product license.

They predicted that by 2010, 30 per cent of new software purchases in Asia-Pacific will be delivered via an application utility or SaaS model. The market potential for SaaS in Asia is estimated to touch $1.16 billion by 2010.

Briefing reporters, NIIT Technologies CEO Arvind Thakur said “SaaS offering is an exciting business innovation which transforms traditional headcount-based IT services model to a ‘pay-as-you-use’ platform.” For the customer, he claimed, it will reduce upfront investments, improve time for implementation and enhance business value through flexibility in deployment.

Shared service

The advantage of SaaS-based offerings is that it will not need huge upfront investments. The flexibility of the model is built around ‘shared services’ concept where enterprises can feed from common pool of customized IT applications. This scalable offering will offer full functionality of business processes. It can structured differently on the basis of the need of the customer.

Initially the service will focus on procurement process but will soon get extended to key business processes like sales and distribution, financials and HR management and payroll, Mr Thakur said.