Industry Findings: Strengthened regulatory baseline for personal data has reshaped how Indian enterprises and public bodies evaluate SaaS suppliers. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act published in Aug-2023 introduced explicit obligations on lawful processing, data portability, and fiduciary duties that buyers now treat as a core procurement filter. That statutory change forced architecture teams to design tiered data domains that separate regulated records from aggregated analytics, and it pushed legal and procurement functions to require in-product consent controls, export-impact assessments, and audit-capable telemetry as standard commercial deliverables. The practical result: vendor shortlists now favour suppliers who can demonstrate modular data-residency controls and built-in compliance tooling; procurement timelines lengthened as in-country controls and demonstrable policy-to-product mappings became gating requirements for enterprise deployments.
Industry Player Insights: Indian industry shifts are guided by TCS, Zoho, Freshworks, and Infosys etc. As per our findings, domestic and domestic-anchored vendors accelerated sovereign and AI-enabled product moves to match the stronger regulatory bar. TCS launched its SovereignSecure Cloud and related India-centric AI and cyber toolsets in Apr-2025, which signalled to large buyers that integrated sovereign hosting plus managed compliance packaging is commercially available; that offering shortened procurement objections for regulated public and financial workloads. Zoho expanded WorkDrive and enterprise collaboration controls across 2024–Jan-2024, raising expectations among mid-market customers for integrated content governance. Freshworks productised Freddy AI agent capabilities in Oct-2024 to automate support and IT workflows, which pushed buyers to demand deployability, data-segregation options, and audit trails for embedded assistants. Infosys emphasised cloud and AI transformation blueprints through 2024–Feb-2025, which reinforced system-integrator led offers combining platform, migration, and compliance services; buyers consequently preferred bundled delivery models that reduce internal transformation risk.