Software as a service (SaaS) is gaining traction in the Indian market and more players are switching to SaaS to combat the current economic downturn. Sunny Ghosh, Cofounder and CEO, Wolf Frameworks foresaw a huge potential market. According to Mckinsey, the total opportunity in SaaS platforms will grow from $5 billion to $11 billion by 2012 and about $1.5 billion to $3 billion will be in database, development, and integration layers where Wolf plans to make more direct offerings and play a substantial role. Founded in 2006 by Ralph Vaz and Sunny Ghosh, the Bangalore based Wolf Frameworks is offering a 100 percent browser based Web application design and development Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for creating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) type business applications on the Internet. It allows business analysts, domain experts, and software solution providers to develop and deliver business applications from just a browser interface without writing technical code.

Prior to founding WOLF, while Ghosh was working with partners and customers across Asia and the Americas as the President of EPiServer CMS, he recognized the growing need for an Internet based Web 2.0 platform that could develop and deliver complete functional software 70 percent faster and could dramatically lower the cost to meet the growing needs of small and medium businesses to use customized software with limited budgets.

"Most Internet based platforms help economize creating, utilizing, and maintaining software for customers, but unfortunately they enforce strict proprietary programming languages, fixed cloud based data storage, and lack interoperability – bringing up portability, migration path issues, and locking fears for large enterprises - contrary to the basic principles of the Internet," says Ghosh. These key challenges triggered the entrepreneur in him to offer the Wolf platform in a hybrid model for SMB enterprises and ISVs.

Currently, Wolf's on-demand model offers more than 25 ready-to-use business applications such as Wolf Inventory Management, Fleet Mgmt, Helpdesk, and CRM and Project Management for SMBs and the company plans to bring partners-driven customer centric SaaS applications to the market. The Wolf applications are services paid by the user on a monthly basis, which has a one-time signup charge (Rs. 5,000 for most apps) and recurring per user subscription charge of Rs. 500. Anybody who develops applications on the Wolf Platform is free to submit the application to Wolf Solutions Gallery and in turn earn revenue on them. The Wolf delivery includes all infrastructure charges.

For enterprises, the platform enables partners to design serious applications, save their data in their own preferred private server, and even allow extraction of business design in XML format at the click of a mouse. "Users can also request wolf to transform their business design XML in their preferred XML schemata that can then be exported into other platforms, unlocking customer fears of being locked inside an Internet based platform," explains Ghosh.