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ShareBangalore: For a company that counts the likes of Unilever, AstraZeneca and Citi among its 40 odd customers, it comes as a surprise to many that Chennai-based OrangeScape Technologies is just a six-year-old start-up that employs only 50 people.
It is the only Indian company to figure in research firm Gartner's list of the world's top-10 cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers and to be counted in the same breath as giants Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Intuit Inc.
Founded by Suresh Sambandam, its CEO who has earlier worked with Hewlett-Packard, the company delivers services built on its cloud-based platform for various verticals including government and BPO units.
While cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS), has been around for some time now, Platform as a Service (PaaS), is relatively new and spells a global opportunity of $9 billion per annum, growing at a CAGR of 160%.
PaaS most commonly refers to the delivery of a computing platform and the required programming capability as a service to users without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the necessary hardware and software while leveraging the internet to hire or use these resources for a fee.
The company's software is intended for use by non-developers who wish to create simple applications, for use either on their desktops or on the internet. OrangeScape says its USP is that it built a rule engine based on which even people with minimal knowledge of programming language can write applications.
"We realised that business people understand spreadsheets well and suddenly almost anyone is a programmer now," Sambandam said.
"Our offering is ideally suited for enterprises that are venturing into SaaS across verticals and want to have their own applications," he said. All one needs is a good knowledge of using the spreadsheet and with a two-week training programme that OrangeScape
provides.
But how did Sambandam hit on the cloud?
It all happened after Selectica Inc, a contract lifecycle management software company, where Sambandam headed the group that built the health insurance application suite, sold off the division to Accenture. Rather than move over to the multinational, he and a few friends decided to branch off on their own.
"Ours is a completely bootstrapped company," he said. Of course, the fact that Accenture needed someone to maintain the eInsurance suite bought from Selectica meant some revenues to keep the company going in the initial days, he told DNA Money.
Now there are quite a few venture firms wanting to invest given OrangeScape's success and the buzz around the cloud, he said.
But then, when it started OrangeScape was nowhere on the cloud. "In fact the cloud is a phenomenon of the just last 18 months," he said.
"We foresee that there will be a flurry of micro-ISVs (independent software vendors), typically of 4-5 people, who need no hardware or a marketing set-up but can still hit the ground running to kick off their businesses," Sambandam said.
