Final agenda for Techcircle SaaS Forum 2014; last few seats left; register today

The stage is set for the third edition of immensely successful Techcircle SaaS Forum 2014 to understand imperative issues related to SaaS services and its future in India. The event, scheduled for October 9 at Vivanta By TAJ - M G Road, Bangalore, would congregate top and emerging SaaS firms, senior SaaS professionals, product development heads, innovators to investors to share best business practices impacting Indian SaaS industry.

Through a series of panel discussions & in-depth presentations, the forum would highlight how the world of SaaS is bringing change to businesses of all scale and size. Besides, Techcircle showcase powered by Nasscom 10,000 Startups will feature innovative SaaS companies, their path-breaking ideas, business models and niche opportunities.

Here is the final agenda and list of all speakers:

8:30am - 9:30am

Tea, Networking & Registration 9:30am - 9:45am Introductory Note

9:45am - 10:30am Panel I: What does it take to build a world-class SaaS company out of India? With the IT Industry working on being globally local, how difficult it is to build a world-class SaaS company out of India? How capable are Indian entrepreneurs in understanding the nuances of the global audience? How does one starts - going horizontal focusing on marketing, CRM, storage, IT or vertical focusing on specific industry like healthcare, financial services and others? What target markets to go behind: India, Outside India, developed or developing markets? How does one positions itself vis-a-vis competition? Does the CEO need to relocate to the respective major international market?

Ambarish Gupta - Founder & CEO, Knowlarity Communications Pvt Ltd Ajay Modani - Co-founder & COO, Capillary Technologies Pvt Ltd Atul Batra - CTO, Manthan Software Services Pvt. Ltd Mukul Kumar - Co-founder & Senior Vice President Engineering, PubMatic Vishal Gupta - MD, Bessemer Venture Partners (Moderator)

10:30am - 11:15am Panel II: Mapping SaaS footprint on burgeoning Indian SME markets: Opportunities & Challenges? Is Indian market ready to consume SaaS services in abundance, which is still in its infancy phase? What are the major logjam SaaS providers face in India? Why is product customization an essential tool for small Indian businesses unlike best standard global practices followed by big firms? SME's run spate of management operations like information management, workflow management, providing customer insights, customer engagement, customer feedback, retention, conversion and much more - Can adoption of SaaS services help in reducing such high management cost? How are SME's comforted by using SaaS based applications over basic enterprise software?

Aditya Sanghi - Co-founder & CEO, Hotelogix Bharati Jacob - Founder & Partner, Seedfund Shivakumar Ganesan - Co-Founder & CEO, Exotel Alok Goyal - Partner, Helion Advisors Pvt. Ltd (Moderator)

11:15am - 11:45am Tea & Networking Break

11:45am - 12:30pm Panel III: Importance of product management in defining an excellent product: Is it imperative? Simply focusing on coding, features and functions doesn't seem to be helpful, so what more can be done by product management professionals to get customer lifecycle smoother? What is different about product management and engineering for SaaS solutions? Is there good product management talent in India? Does one need to base this function in US, closer to the customers or offshore can be the better model? At what stage does a startup qualifies that it has 'validated' its model? What do you build vs. use from open-source/ 3rd party? What are the implications in choosing any of the routes? Has the emergence of cloud changed the way for product management?

Peeyush Rai - CTO & Co-Founder, Canvera Digital Technologies Pvt Ltd Rajat Malhotra - VP Product & Engineering, ZipDial Harishankaran K - Co-Founder, Hackerrank Mohan Kumar - Executive Director, Norwest Venture Partner

Suresh Shanmugham - Managing Partner, Saama Capital (Moderator)

12:30pm - 12:45pm Presentation – "Seize the moment with Cloud" Sanjay Siboo - Country Manager, Cloud Services, IBM India & South Asia

12:45pm – 1:45pm Lunch & Networking

1:45pm - 2:30pm Panel IV: Recognizing right pricing model for SaaS services: Local & Global Customers With freemium model being most popular among the Indian masses, how can one increase revenues despite offering free trial sessions? What are different pricing models proven globally and suited for Indian companies? For a new entrepreneur, what can be the best pricing model? What are acceptable rates of monthly/quarterly/annual attrition in terms of subscriptions for emerging SaaS companies? What are the ways to overcome the subscription billing challenge for customers in India? How can one get customers to sign long term contracts vis-a-vis subscription model? What kind of (non-payment) ecosystem enablers would help the SaaS industry grow in India?

Abinash Tripathy - Founder & CEO, Helpshift Tanuj Mendiratta - Co-founder & CEO, Appiterate Gurpreet Singh - Co-founder & CEO, Browntape.com Deepesh Agarwal - Co-founder, CEO, MoveInSync Sanjay Nath - Co-founder & MD, Blume Ventures (Moderator)

2:30pm - 3:00pm Techcircle Showcase - Powered by Nasscom 10,000 Startups Here five innovative companies in the SaaS space will come on the stage and make presentations on their path-breaking ideas, business models and niche opportunities.

Techcirce Showcase Jury Dr. Srikanth Sundarrajan - Venture Partner, Helion Advisors Pvt. Ltd Krishna Jha - Angel Investor, Indian Angel Network

3:00pm - 3:30pm Tea & Networking

3:30pm - 3:45pm Presentation – "Building Scalability in Technology and Businesses" Prashant Jain, Director, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd

3:45pm - 4:30pm Panel V: Latent shift in IT budgets driving SaaS adoption across industries: Opportunities & Implications With shrinking IT budgets, limited technical service staffs, costly legacy systems, time management issues, growing need of business analytics, SaaS stands out to be the most viable option however how do companies tackle with critical data security issues that inhibits privacy at large? Why SaaS model makes sense to most of the companies? Can Indian companies trust to take the entire tech infrastructure on the cloud? CRM, ERP, emails which together contributes 80% of the market, which other programs are on the CIO's hit-list today to integrate with business information systems in proven cost effective models? What are the advantages of adopting SaaS to COO's, CTO's & CMO's of the organizations when taking their respective operations data on the cloud? Which sectors are rapidly adopting & which sectors are still seen to be laggard and why? What are the challenges that crop up while bringing in SaaS?

Girish Rowjee - Co-Founder & CEO, Greytip Software Sriram Kannan - Founder & CEO, Nivaata Systems Ashish Agarwal - Founder & CTO, Solutions Infini Vinod Krishnan - Head - Business Development (South India and Sri Lanka), Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd Rehan Yar Khan - General Partner & Founder, Orios Venture Partners (Moderator) Register now or write to Sandeep/ Ipshita at register@vccircle.com or call 0120-4171111.