How to create and earn on SaaS / SaaS - the realities of the Russian market

Summer

Summer and time to finalize a series of articles on the life of SaaS. My personal opinion is that for the “Company Blog” format and for the Habrahabr format as a whole, the series was a success and will help those who still decide to create SaaS stories not just accumulate right away, but live for a while and maybe take off.
A lot has been done over the past 2 months and 8 articles - I tried to start with a general approach to creating SaaS services, invited friends and experts to speak on topics, delved into the theory with Alexander Prozorov, looked into the future and promoted my Quickme service in a company blog.

On the topic of SaaS in Russia as a whole and from good - SaaS services in Russia are many and new projects from local ISV appear monthly. To confirm the good, all global vendors have long been actively playing on our clearing in games with * aaS.
From the bad - the sudden departure from Megaplan of its founder, Mikhail Smolyanov. I don’t want to discuss the latter, but I definitely need to emphasize in bold italics that Megaplan was the # 1 success story of the Russian “first wave” SaaS.

But in Russia?

Russia certainly has its own characteristics, which I will say briefly (summer is the same). So:
- Market Place (app store for such services) do not work - do not sell services with rare exceptions.
- Telecom operators have not learned to sell SaaS and are unlikely to want to do it.
“Most ISVs think in standards of customized development and projects (they want a lot of money) and are not ready to be content with“ installment plans ”.
- Customers want a large check for the acquisition and motivation systems right away - this greatly hinders, although the savings in the SaaS business model are obvious.
- While the SaaS market is 4% of the total number of small and medium business companies is approximately 40,000 companies.
- Annual SaaS penetration in SMB 15% - i.e. will be better.
- There have been successful attempts to integrate services. For example, Bitrix 24+ Zingaya .
- Leading system integrators create separate cloud projects, for example, I-oblako .
- Banks (large companies) use cloud solutions - Salesforce, Cloud mail ( QM Bank ), Google apps.
- Analysts believe market participants are still “crooked”, interfering in a heap of Contour, Zebra Telecom and Moisklad.
- For SaaS, the obvious future is the purchase of MoySklad and Megaplan, this is a direct confirmation.
- SaaS in Russia will stand apart from other * aaS-s due to the latter’s reference to major customers and cloud service providers (data centers).
- The explosive growth in the number of niche automation systems for the SaaS business model. A clear example from colleagues from the Crimea is Dental-cloud .
- The global PaaS vendors and Russian players in this niche are very active. Many services are created under Azure.
- Attempts to deeply integrate SaaS services by the Kira Plastinina cloud market novice (crossed out) Cityconnect are planned .
- Several large banks launched SaaS services sales platforms for their clients.
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Thanks to everyone who read and who was interested. On this, I finalize the series “How to create and earn money on SaaS” and start writing exclusively about features, ideologies, successes of Quickme.

Alexey Kalachnikov