getting very good traction within enterprises, and through our Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series, we’ve heard from various CIOs who are moving from Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange to Google’s Office suite. One of the primary drivers of the switch is cost. A second is collaboration.
Currently, when enterprises switch to Google’s productivity suite, they still need to make provisions to move the large portfolio of home grown long tail productivity apps that have been developed around the previous system, such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. And in comes the Google App Engine as Google’s offering in this context.
Well, it turns out that to port long tail productivity apps to Google’s App Engine is a somewhat cumbersome job, and requires a lot of custom development. Building new apps is also not as simple.
Enter OrangeScape. The long tail apps can easily be ported to or developed on Google App Engine in a third of the time and cost using OrangeScape as an application platform. Voila, the entire productivity suite of an enterprise can become cloud-ready, quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively!
Orangescape has raised funding from the Indian Angel Network, and has since launched additional SaaS products.
Finally, there’s Sensible Softwares, a Pune, India-based company that launched in 2009 with its flagship product offering BootStrapToday, an application life cycle management platform for software development teams. Sensible Softwares targets freelance developers and software development teams in small and medium companies located in the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia.
An early-stage product with a small set of customers, Sensible Softwares is striving to claim its own piece of an $867 million market pie with a learning technology based debugging and testing engine that significantly reduces testing costs in a software development lifecycle.
I have long been a champion of Indian product companies, urging the entrepreneurs to think beyond labor arbitrage and outsourcing. Today, I am thrilled to see that Freshdesk, OrangeScape and Sensible Softwares are emerging as promising players in the Indian startup firmament, and reaching for global market penetration.
But SaaS companies are sprouting everywhere, and in every niche. Happy Grasshopper, a Florida-based company that helps businesses effectively stay in touch with past and present customers, is one that is getting great traction in the real estate industry. Founded in 2007, Happy Grasshopper offers an email marketing service for keeping in touch with customers, prospects, and effectively soliciting referrals through conversational email messages. Happy Grasshopper is a 100% bootstrapped company that has generated revenue since its second month in operation.
Part of Happy Grasshopper’s rapid growth came courtesy of an endorsement written by Todd Clark, a real estate agent in Beaverton, Oregon. It didn’t hurt that the company was also featured in Realtor magazine’s “Cool Tools” section. Press coverage, blogging, channel partners and an affiliate program all help Happy Grasshopper to continue attracting new customers. The company should reach $1M in short order.
These are interesting and exciting times for One Million by One Million portfolio and for the SaaS industry as a whole. I look forward to watching how these companies progress over the coming years.
