SaaS looking beyond North America to openings in developing regions: Zoho executive

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The software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry is increasingly looking at diversifying outside North America, not just because of tariff-related uncertainties and a slowdown in developed markets, but also due to opportunities emerging from digitisation in developing regions which are typically underserved by large technology firms, a senior Zoho Corp executive said.Markets like India and Latin America, for instance, are growing at double the rate of the global average, said Rajesh Ganesan , chief executive of Zoho's enterprise IT management solutions arm, ManageEngine 'The revenue share or the momentum of growth from North America, from the UK, Canada, Australia sort of slowed down in calendar year 2023 and 2024,' Ganesan told ET, adding that regions like India, the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia drove the growth for the company over the past two years.There is also a growing opportunity in riding the 'compliance wave' as IT systems have to align with an increasing number of digital privacy regulations, from the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation to India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act and Brazil's General Data Protection Law.When it comes to AI, there is a lot of interest from enterprises, but adoption of the technology still lags because of unclear use cases alongside regulatory uncertainties and a lack of techniques for ensuring access control and traceability of data in existing models, Ganesan said.Unless this is solved, sensitive sectors like BFSI, healthcare and pharmaceuticals will find it hard to take the leap with AI despite the potential benefits, he said.SaaS will not 'die' because of AI, he said; however, the way SaaS is architected will have to evolve to adapt to the new realities, said Ganesan."Now, in addition to humans, you are going to have a lot of autonomous AI agents, so you need to change the architect of your SaaS applications to be able to deal with the situation. That is the reality, and for which the clarity doesn't exist today,' he said.

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