Proquest Solutions, an Indian on-demand product provider, has announced what company officials say is a special low-cost product “ideal during slow down for the Small and Medium business owners of India,” offering NetSuite’s integrated ERP, CRM & E-commerce product starting at $6,000 for a five-user pack for a limited time.

 

Founded in 1998, NetSuite (News - Alert) offers one of the few all-inclusive hosted systems with customer relationship management (CRM), order fulfillment; inventory, accounting and finance, product assembly, e-commerce, Web site management and employee productivity tools. Whether it’s the best at all those functions is debatable.

 

Last month TMC reported that NetSuite and HP partnered to offer SaaS (News - Alert) business apps to the SMB market. HP’s U.S.-based network of 15,000 value-added resellers is being tapped to distribute “cloud services” to SMBs:

 

“More specifically, HP and NetSuite have created a referral-based program available to HP’s channel partners, giving them the opportunity to offer new management and implementation services. These are available for NetSuite’s customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource management (ERP) and e-commerce products, as well as HP’s Total Care portfolio.”

 

Small and mid-size Indian business owners are “not keen to invest in large ERP installations, which require large capex expenditures,” Proquest officials say, adding that they aren’t excited about six to eight-month installation times. Hence, “there has never been a better time to adopt Software as a Service (SaaS) based product such as NetSuite’s integrated product at an affordable price point making a stronger ROI for the Indian decision makers,” contends Biswas Nair, Managing director, Proquest.

 

Nair notes there are over 2,000 subscribed licensed users of NetSuite currently in India, “and this is growing month after month.”

 

Analyst firm Springboard Research forecasts that the SaaS market in Asia will reach $1.16 billion by 2010, with a cumulative annual growth rate of 66 percent, to comprise 35 percent of the enterprise software application market.