Octopus, a U.K.-based company that provides human resource technology solutions to its clients that range from CEOs to employees, is now utilizing software-as-a-service technology and delivery model to offer a compelling new suite of HR software solutions.

In its expanded form, the Octopus HR software now includes HR, Recruitment, Performance, Time, Expenses, and Payroll.

Octopus is a great believer in the power of SaaS (News – Alert), according to company officials. The company believes that the SaaS model really helps to redefine the provider-to-customer relationship and ensures that the highest levels of customer service are delivered and maintained at all times. The SaaS model essentially means that the customer can stop using and paying for the software and service provided either at any time or at contractually-agreed break points.

The company outlines several points that make Octopus HR SaaS model a better solution than on-premise solutions for the HR departments.

Since the Octopus system uses the existing Internet connections, no additional hardware, software or infrastructure are needed and because it uses the web-based interface that people are familiar with, minimal training is needed.

With Octopus HR SaaS model, company’s HR system is automatically updated by Octopus without ever interrupting its service to the company. It also ensures that all customers are on the same ‘version’ as each other, allowing support and training to be much easier and therefore faster and cheaper.

Moreover, Octopus HR SaaS model makes an affordable solution with the monthly Octopus subscription including all hosting costs, maintenance, support and all your regular upgrades, adding new features and functionality.

The HR solutions are available 24/7 on any device capable of running a standard browser this includes even mobile devices, so, for example, holidays can be requested by employees from work or home, on their PC or mobile device and likewise checked and approved by managers.

Recruitment is another area where this model comes to real help. Octopus Recruit enables its clients to automatically publish new vacancies on the web allowing applicants to apply and upload their CV details, with their information then being instantly available for managers to review and take action on.

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The UK will spend over £1 billion on cloud computing by 2012 – twice as much as today – researchers predict.

This would mean more consumers and businesses subscribing to web-based services, such as Google Apps.

Cloud-based services currently account for around 7.5% of the £8 billion UK software market, according to research company TechMarketView.

But others say cloud computing is hyped and will complement traditional desktop software rather than replace it.

“In the old days, big companies used to generate their own electricity. But they do not do that any more”, said Philip Carnelley, senior analyst at TechMarketView.

“Software is going the same way – let others do the processing.”

TechMarketView predicts cloud services will be worth around £1.2 billion per year in the UK by 2012.

“This is not just analysts hyping things up”, says Philip Carnelley, a senior analyst at the company. “It is a genuine shift.”

Cloud computing means that people do not have to invest in powerful computers and software to store their data.

Instead, they can outsource their needs to cloud companies, which charge subscription fees.

Hybrid evolution

But not everyone agrees that cloud computing will replace traditional software which processes data locally.

“The amount of cloud computing is quite small at the moment, so even if it does double that is not such a big deal”, says analyst Laurent Lachal at rival research firm Ovum.

“The IT industry loves to concentrate on a topic for a few months and then turn against it. There will be a backlash by the end of the year.”

Lachal does not dismiss cloud computing, but he thinks its limitations make it more of an add-on to software.

“It’s becoming a hybrid system – for example you create your work on software on your PC, and then you save it and share it through the cloud.”

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Commentary – Ten years ago, corporate finance departments’ quest to identify solutions that could automate and streamline operations – and maximize cash flow – was an expensive and arduous one. Not only did finance managers need to navigate the overwhelming array of then-unproven solution options, they also needed to overcome growing resistance from internal IT departments that were intent on standardizing on a single ERP vendor.

On the one hand, who could blame IT for being reluctant to adopt best-of-breed software? The typical enterprise software installation involved lengthy rollouts of 18 to 24-months, cost millions of dollars in hardware and required countless hours of IT resources to deploy and maintain onsite. So, limiting deployment of non-ERP systems seems a logical way to standardize and limit burdens on already scarce IT resources.

Unfortunately, as increasingly frustrated finance directors learned first-hand, IT’s unwavering stance on system consolidation often failed to support the needs and business objectives of finance or any other functional department. As a result, finance’s productivity and performance was often hindered – not helped – by the company’s overarching IT strategy.

Software as a Service (SaaS) has changed all this. By delivering application functionality as a globally accessible, web-based service, SaaS – or On Demand – has bridged the gap between business and IT – enabling finance directors and other business line executives to access the functionality required to meet and exceed their goals while still toeing the line on corporate IT strategy.

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The predominant benefit in 2009 from cloud computing was access to less expensive computing power and availability of more SaaS based solutions. But how will solutions providers make money from cloud and SaaS offerings in 2010? Here are some clues.

During 2009, VARs that promoted on-premise solutions were challenged to redefine their value-add since much of what they had built their business and expertise around was becoming commoditized. The question for many was how to participate in cloud computing in a way that allowed them to make money.

Platform as a Service

The answer: Platform as a Service (PaaS) will likely become an increasingly good opportunity for Solution Partners to leverage the cloud, continue to add value to their customers, and make money in 2010. Here is why.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) such as force.com and Google app engine provide an on-demand development environment that reduces development environment complexity, time and cost so that developers can focus on building applications. Some are taking it a step further and focusing on the needs of Solution Partners, providing very innovative ways to help them expand their business.

The current trend is improving time to market and time to revenue which is greatly dependent on how quickly you can build and deploy an application. The opportunity to add value now is not so much in technical competency but in a Partner’s understanding of the business problem that needs to be solved and then building that application in a way that adds the most immediate value to the business.  As Heather Margolis pointed out in July 2009, SaaS will drive the emergence of a new type of partner, who has strong business domain expertise  and who traditionally may not have focused on providing technology solutions.

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1. SaaS will continue to grow in acceptance and prevalence in the marketplace but – the term itself will fade in favor of “Cloud (insert your term).” There is no end of analysts predicting the continued growth in 2010 of SaaS as a business model for software vendors and a positive direction for software users. That part of the prediction is about as safe as predicting rain will come to Seattle sometime next year. But – we’re not going to call it SaaS much anymore? Is all that marketing ink going to disappear? No. But the truth is we get tired of hearing the same old tune everyday and it starts to become little more than background hummmm. Everything “Cloud” is ascending and marketing loves it because it is by definition a nebulous, foggy term that can be floated for nearly any purpose. I could just as easily say the same thing about the time worn acronym Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). At the heart of all well-designed services is a SOA strategy – but we don’t really talk about it explicitly. Marketing has hit that nail for over 10 years and still very few know what we’re talking about. The same is true of SaaS. Discuss the term and we get tied up in preconceived arguments about security, lock-in, lifetime costs, and multi-tenancy without discussing the business case for vendors and users. Next year we’ll be shedding those arguments and just selling mature services without acronyms. And to add one more log to the fire that will lower the prominence of the term “Software as a Service” – vendors of virtualized infrastructure have already hit commodity pricing thanks to Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s offering – the only place for them to go is to add application suites to their “cloud.”

2. Real business value in SaaS will continue to improve, be better understood and measured more explicitly. There is a growing understanding of the difference between an ASP implementation of a standard premise-based application and a service that designed for the delivery medium that is embodied in SaaS. It is much more than technology or an offset of costs for infrastructure and resources. That said, the metrics on both the vendor side and end-user side of the SaaS equation need more clarity and uniform acceptance. As a buyer of a SaaS offering, I shouldn’t care if it has been adopted by hundreds or millions of users. What matters is who is using it successfully and what is their context? If I am going to base a critical part of my business on a SaaS offering, I need to understand if the lifetime value of customers is substantially greater than the cost of customer acquisition. I need to have confidence that the adoption of the service is higher than abandonment. I need to know the service will have enough value to continue. Having that confidence is a product of a conversation between the SaaS vendor and their customers/end-users. It takes some real thinking on the part of the vendor to engage in that level of collaboration – but we will continue to see the most successful services providing a model of this behavior and inspire others to do likewise.

3. Service ecosystems will rise. Best case SaaS should be designed to meet the market embodied in the Long Tail. As we and others have said many times, the economics of SaaS and efficiencies of modern development cannot really be leveraged without a good-sized market. You can often reach sufficient market size by targeting your service to the second and third tier markets in a vertical but the time required to reach positive cash flow in SaaS can still cause many problems. Whether a specific service can be sold to a wider market or not then – it is wise to consider an ecosystem approach and I believe many will in the coming year. Salesforce and Google both exploit their ecosystems to bring a broad range of services together on their platforms and as was mentioned in our first point, cloud infrastructure vendors are heading in the same direction. In verticals, I can imagine a focused service teaming up with a general operations package for instance – especially one that could be pre-configured and integrated to the vertical application providing a “suite” for users. This can give users the benefits of single sign-on, data sharing, perhaps a lower total cost (assuming the vendors recognize the value in packaging joint services) and a “desktop” for most tasks they do everyday. In fact, in the long run, I don’t expect to see many “stand alone” services – it just doesn’t make sense for the users or the vendors. We will see a lot more applications “joining forces” strategically or being acquired in the next year by integrating, combining user data pools or through “Mash-Ups.”

4. New services will focus less on “doing it all from day one” and more on their roadmap. In the “brave new era” of SaaS, one of the big impediments of developing a service was all the decisions you had to make and all the business operational aspects you had to have a handle on to arrive at requirements and start development. Many entrepreneurs felt they were being asked to either start with the equivalent of the original Wright Flyer or with a development burden so large they could never reach a positive cash flow with a reasonable investment. Now however, there is a wide array of mature, tested services that can be easily integrated into a service product to provide standard approaches to operations, integration, sales, and many other business and technical requirements. With an extensible architecture, there is a great value in picking “best of breed” services to do the “dirty work” while focusing custom development work efficiently on the real value proposition for a service. The time to market and up front investment decrease dramatically and the risk of running out of cash on a reasonable investment is contained. As none other than one of the leading investment groups has proclaimed, “Less is more!” And rather than worry about “lock in” – thoughtful entrepreneurs will realize at the point in the road where the cost of the integrated services begins to be a part of overhead that is worth investing some development time in – current development practices can allow extensions to the application without an expensive rewrite.

5. Integration requirements will drive standards for service-based communication and interaction. If cloud “ecosystems” are going to rise, if online services are really going to dominate the market for innovative products in the near term, standards for integration and service-to-service interaction need to be recognized and grow dramatically. Despite the continuing whines of a few holdouts – no serious vendor of online services should be considering parallel deployments – both on site and across the Internet. Developing a product that can address both markets eventually becomes “SoSaaS” – a product so hobbled by its split identity it cannot truly leverage the value of either delivery model. Instead, with an extensible Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), open APIs and standard integration tools, online services will offer ways to leverage local data, applications, and other online services in ways that are in the end much cheaper and more reliable than traditional custom integration services. This doesn’t mean SaaS vendors won’t offer on-site applications – but in many cases those applications will be hubs for addressing local integration needs and compliance issues.

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When we think about software-as-a-service (SaaS), we tend to envision large-scale services such as Salesforce.com. After all, the conventional wisdom is that for providers to make money, they need scale. But much of that conventional wisdom will be turned on its head in 2010.

More targeted SaaS application environments will evolve with the availability of ready-made platforms such as Force.com from Salesforce.com, Azure from Microsoft and SaaSGrid from Apprenda.
The least known of the three, but perhaps with the most impact, is Apprenda, which not only provides a platform for hosting the applications but also the software to manage a SaaS business. That means lots of potential vendors that previously lacked the capital to set up a SaaS business could leverage Apprenda. And more importantly, company CEO Sinclair Schuller says he expects his service to especially appeal to startup software companies that want to target vertical industries. The result of all this expansion should be a much richer SaaS ecosystem.

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Korea Leaps on Cloud Computing Bandwagon

The government will spend around 200 billion won (about $172 million) next year for a number of ambitious Web-based computing projects to help the technology industry create more demand for their nascent cloud services, officials said Tuesday.

Cloud computing, the latest buzzwords in the technology sector, describes a new era of Internet usage when information and software are delivered over the Web, rather than a desktop computer.

Most activities and data will be stored online and accessed from a wider range of devices, including computers and mobile Internet gadgets, and the changes will allow companies to deliver information technology (IT) power in more efficient and cost-effective ways, Seoul policymakers say.

The world’s major Internet and technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, are aggressive in pushing their own version of cloud computing services.

The Korean technology community seems to have the fever too with companies like Samsung SDS and LG CNS eager to get out of the gate early.

Cloud computing solutions are also a critical part of the Korean government’s green tech initiatives that focus on low-power devices for personal computers, televisions, displays and servers. Getting particular attention are low-power mobile Internet devices, light-emitting diode (LED) backlighting technology, solid-state drives (SSDs), and electric and hybrid vehicles.

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Why Some Merchants are Saying Yes to SaaS

When determining your total e-commerce spend, you have to identify all online expenses, such as IT costs, personnel for marketing and merchandising, content and outside services, among other things.

The costs add up quickly, which is why Software as a Service (SaaS) is a growing trend in where multichannel merchants are putting their e-commerce dollars.

SaaS—outsourcing the development and hosting of Websites—can be a cost-effective way of gaining new site functionality, reducing operating costs with less reliance on internal IT and accessibility to continuous upgrades. In our experience, SaaS costs range from 1% to 4% of sales.

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How to Ensure SAAS Providers Are Truly Protecting Your Data

From small businesses to large enterprises, 2009 was the year software as a service broke into the mainstream. But the transformation of this once niche segment into a mass-market phenomenon hasn’t come easily. One roadblock to greater SAAS adoption has been executives’ lack of clarity around best practices for security protocols and data protection. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Jonathan McCormick explains how executives can ensure that SAAS providers are truly protecting their company’s data.

Just recently, T-Mobile, which employs software as a service (or “cloud”) technologies to store its customers’ data, suffered a serious systems failure. This failure cost many of its customers their contact information. Following the event, it was blogged how these “incidents clearly illustrate that whenever organizations entrust their data to a third party, whether via a cloud computing service or a traditional outsourcing arrangement, it is important to carefully evaluate the vendor’s technical and operational capabilities to fully protect the data to mitigate potential business risks.”

The T-Mobile incident and other similar occurrences underscore the urgent need for executives to better understand the security protocols of their current or prospective SAAS providers. As such, here are a few tips executives at any size business should use when seeking out SAAS services.

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China’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry over the next two to three years will see growth rates exceeding the traditional IT industry, which includes on-premise software, according to a new report.

Released Wednesday by Springboard Research, by end-2010, the Chinese SaaS market will expand 56 percent to reach US$171 million. Three out of four respondents in the survey already subscribed to SaaS products, while more than half of the remaining respondents were likely to subscribe to hosted software in the next 12 months.

Devin Wang, business analyst for emerging software at Springboard, said SaaS’s appeal and growth in China is boosted by its lower upfront costs, easier maintenance and quick rollouts.

“We see aggressive demand for SaaS in China in the coming months, as corporate IT budgets continue to be under tighter scrutiny and enterprises look to hire fewer technical staff,” Wang said in the report.

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