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Global Reach
applications, and then put them up on the AppExchange, a
marketplace for software-as-a-service business applications.
Indian partners took them up on the offer: Salesforce.com had
70,000 developers signed up in the first year, of which 10,000
were from India, the largest number from any country outside of
the United States.
New Delhi-based software firm Compro Technologies builds customized
applications, integrates them with legacy CRM systems and
software, and provides training, under a Salesforce.com-certified
program. Theikos Inc., a Boston CRM consulting firm recently acquired
by Atlanta SaaS solutions provider Astadia, has an office in
Delhi to develop customized solutions with Salesforce.com technology,
and it helps companies transition their CRM functions to SaaS.
Astadia also develops Salesforce.com-based applications.
In 2008, Salesforce.com went a step further, enabling developers
to build new applications that can work on all web-enabled devices
ranging from laptops to PDAs to iPhones to public Internet kiosks
to medical devices.
Students at IIT-Delhi used the Force.com “platform-as-a-service”
(PaaS) for an e-government project with the Delhi municipality that
was eventually localized in Hindi. IT consulting group CRMOrbit in
Chennai has launched a 24-Hour Healthcare Clinic application
from AppExchange that tracks patient records, test procedures,
physician workload, billing, and scheduling. Other PaaS modules
have included emergency room staffing, food ingredient management,
expense reporting, time management, and employee
compliance and training.
A number of major software firms either have shifted or are
planning to shift at least part of their business to the on-demand
SaaS model. Research firm Gartner estimates that the on-demand
segment already accounts for 25% of the $220 billion software
industry worldwide.
Indian IT Establishes a Base in California
In many cases, Indian IT firms have had a California presence long before Silicon Valley tech
companies actively looked overseas. The earliest arrivals were in the late 1980s—computer, soft-
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