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Infobird Pioneers SaaS, the Future of China's Software Industry

BEIJING, March 5 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- On February 9, 2009, the leading venture capital magazine "Red Herring" officially announced the "2008 Red Herring Global 100 Winner List''. With its technological innovation in contact center solution and achievement in SaaS(Software as a Service), Beijing Infobird became one of the five winners from Mainland China.

Red Herring made its fame by identifying innovative high-tech enterprises with best investment potential at their early stages; its early days' winner list included Netscape, Yahoo, eBay, Google and YouTube, which are world-renowned but were obscure before they were selected by Red Herring. Due to that reason, Red Herring winners naturally attract much attention from venture capital firms.

With the global economic downturn, Red Herring's Global 100 Winner List in 2008 drew extraordinary attention. One big reason is that innovation based on high-tech has been an effective means of revitalizing the economy. In the world economic crisis of 1929, it was the technological breakthroughs in electronics, aeronautics and astronautics, and nuclear energy that restarted another round of rapid economic growth; in the 1940s and 1950s, it was the emergence of computers and synthetic materials that led the United States to post-war prosperity quickly. The latest internet technology revolution helped the United States effectively recover from the 1987 economic crisis.

Facing the gloomy global economy, people almost invariably put their eyeballs on technological innovation and expect that technological innovation could open up new horizons like a sharp sword. On January 9, 2009, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said at the National Conference on Science and Technology Awards: "knowledge and technology are the important factors for sustainable development and also fundamental forces to overcome the economic hardship."

For the software industry, SaaS (Software as a Service) is a great innovation; it changes the software delivery model. With this innovation, the business model of software is no longer to sell licenses to customers, but to lease to them. For enterprises, this new model reduces the big amount of fixed capital investment and eliminates the associated risk; at the same time maintenance of the system has also been transferred from the enterprises to the SaaS platform operator. In the United States, the SaaS model is becoming a very popular business model with many successful vendors such as Salesforce, Netsuite, LeadMaster and LiveOps.

The SaaS model is a big innovation in many ways. For enterprises, investment in software transforms from a one-time investment into installment, well addressing the cash flow issue and greatly reducing involved risk, just like the difference between building construction and building rental. From another point of view, previously each enterprise had to maintain their proprietary system; now the vendor of SaaS is in charge of operating the SaaS platform, reducing costs while providing higher quality services; for the software vendors, it turns one-time sale of software into long-term transactions with recurring revenue. Under a traditional license model, after the transaction of selling the license, the software vendors lack motivation to do post sales implementation and maintenance. In the SaaS model, customers can quit at any time, therefore forcing SaaS operators to provide better service.

The innovation brought by the SaaS model makes it a favorite of small and medium-sized enterprises, creating a huge blue ocean in the software industry. For many years, China's software market had been underdeveloped, suffering from the piracy issue; IT application among SMEs was also not common and at a low level, which does not indicate that they have no demand for IT application, but because the traditional information technology is very expensive and involves high risk for them.

The traditional licensing model makes software in China a luxury which only large enterprises can afford while the SME market is almost blank. However, the products made by and services provided by SMEs compose over 50% of the GDP in China. This is an enormous market, an untapped "virgin land" of IT application. The SaaS model makes it feasible for software to enter this "virgin land". The IT market for large enterprises has increasingly become saturated; SaaS is the future of the software industry, demonstrated by the latest movement of the international software giants such as SAP, Microsoft and IBM. Even for large enterprises, SaaS has begun to show its strong attraction. People believe that as the SaaS industry gradually matures, more and more big enterprises will adopt the SaaS model. Especially in the current harsh economic situation, SaaS is an enticing option which is hard to resist for any enterprise. SaaS not only helps cut IT budgets but also provides them powerful but cost-efficient marketing/sales tools. Many service-oriented firms especially e-commerce firms in China are learning to use the SaaS model contact center to acquire and retain clients. Therefore experts predict that, for the next two years, the SaaS industry will grow faster and win more clients.

China's SaaS industry has taken a very difficult first step and began to build trust and reputation among clients, thanks to the pioneers such as Infobird and Alisoft, the steady promoters of SaaS in China. It is them that are creating the future of China's software industry through years of hard work. As a promising industry supporting the modern service industry, SaaS gets strong support from Chinese government; as proof, one portion of its 4 trillion RMB (about 600 billion US$) economic incentive budget is especially for the SaaS industry.

About Beijing Infobird Software Co.; Ltd:

Beijing Infobird Software Co.; Ltd is a professional vendor of call center systems and services, whose main business is to build call centers for enterprises or provide them hosted call center solutions. Infobird has developed hundreds of customers including Alibaba, eLong, The9, Digital China, Zhaopin and People's Insurance Company of China. In February 2008, targeting millions of SMEs in China, Infobird launched Qitongbao, a SaaS model contact center solution, turning contact centers from an IT luxury into a commodity which each enterprise could afford, greatly lowering the barrier for SMEs to adopt contact centers to improve their customer interaction. More information about Beijing Infobird is available on the Internet at "http://www.infobird.com".