The evolution of IT to Saas in India

It is tempting to compare the evolution of the Indian IT services sector from the early 70s to that of the now-burgeoning software as a service (SaaS) pie. It was in the late 60s that TCS, led by technocrat Faqir Chand Kohli, took wing as a management and technology consultancy; in five years, in 1972, the Tata Sons division would go on to fulfill India’s first offshore software delivery contract, for American business equipment maker Burroughs.

It was around this time that another Indian IT services pioneer, the late Narendra Patni, founded Patni Computer Systems (PCS) to offer something similar—outsourced software services and offshore services out of India. The IIT-Roorkee and MIT-educated Patni hired three gentlemen who would decades later become the poster boys of Indian IT services: NR Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani and S Gopalakrishnan. Along with four more, they founded Infosys in the early 80s.

Between Patni and Infosys came along Wipro, born out of a three-decade-old vegetable and refined oil business founded in Amalner in Maharashtra’s Jalgaon district. The emergence of these IT services bellwethers would go on to give birth to a bustling sector—Business Process Outsourcing joined the party in the 90s—that was worth some $227 billion as of the last fiscal.

From TCS and Patni, fast forward to the mid-2000s, when India’s SaaS pioneer Zoho was getting its act together as a business software solutions firm. By the end of that decade, the Sridhar Vembu-founded company was doing $100 million in revenue—enough for the SaaS bandwagon to begin to roll. Uniphore, founded by Umesh Sachdev and Ravi Saraogi in 2008, was incubated at IIT-Madras. Like Zoho—whose origins lie in telecom software entity AdventNet Inc founded in the mid-90s—Uniphore went through multiple pivots before turning into a SaaS operation.