According to the study by Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc., more than US$45 million was spent on hosted applications by SMBs in India in 2009. Two-thirds of the total SMB expenditure of the country was accounted by medium businesses having employees between 100 and 999. Adoption of basic hosted applications was observed by medium as well as small businesses.
Investment in technology is not required for hosted applications. Allocation of time and resources is also not essential for software deployment and maintenance. So there had been a competition for hosted applications over licensed software. Provision of specific modules including CRM, HR, payroll, collaborative applications and others is more advantageous for vendors.
The study reported that there was a growth of 8% in the adoption of hosted application in 2009. Project management, merchant services, inventory management, billing, accounting or financial services, messaging, and payroll are some of the applications that can be included in hosted applications.
Utility computing can be achieved by cloud computing for helping customers in paying only for the computing resources they use. India served as a potential market for cloud computing which hosted several applications. A wide range of services such as development and hosting of managed applications off-premises can be possible.