By Mark Atterby – Senior Staff Writer

As well the benefits of cost, scalability and flexibility, Cloud computing is giving organisations the ability to acquire IT automation to apply to a specific task or function without implementing a complex and costly system upgrade (regardless if it’s hosted or on-premise) nor necessarily engage in an extensive outsourcing project

Terms such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) have emerged as the cloud evolution rolled over the business world and changed the way IT resources are managed. Phil Gamble, from Expenses On Demand, comments, “Offering greater flexibility, the dynamic capacity for managing applications and greater scalability, the cloud has redefined the relationship between organisations and those who provide IT services”.

Generally, as a business or an organisation grows and evolves, new processes will emerge and existing ones will change and become more important. The existing systems in place no longer fully automate the processes that are important to the organisation or have become too complex to manage without significant manual intervention.

At this stage the organisation will be assessing its options. Can they upgrade their existing systems or should they look at installing a new system (i.e. should they upgrade from MYOB to a full blown hosted or on-premise ERP system) or do they outsource the processes or functions that have become too cumbersome to an outsource organisation?

As well as the costs and disruption associated with implementing a new ERP system, the organisation may need to invest in new hardware and servers as well as operating systems to run the new software if they want to have it on-premise.

With the plethora of specialist cloud providers that have emerged over the last few years, it is now possible for organisations to download the functionality they need at the fraction of the cost to upgrading their existing systems and IT infrastructure. For example, when TNT needed to automate the tasks and activities associated with managing employee expenses rather than upgrade or extend their existing SAP system they downloaded the relevant functionality from Expenses On Demand and were up and running within two weeks.

According to Art Papas, Founder and CEO of Bullhorn a leading cloud based candidate management system (www.bullhorn.com) the Cloud has been a game-changer in the recruitment industry. “Internal IT is rarely a recruitment agency core competency, yet Cloud computing puts the same, powerful recruitment software that runs the very biggest firms in to the hands of dynamic start-ups. And, thanks to web services APIs, different cloud vendors’ software can increasingly work together to provide recruiters with a seamless workflow across the entire placement process.”

It means common business functions and tasks can be managed by IT resources that are almost as easy to access as a smart phone application. According to a survey from Equinix , however a range of concerns or issues are emerging based around latency, internet congestion, and performance predictability. These new breed of internet applications rely on data being pushed to web and mobile devices, there by placing greater and more complex need on network infrastructure.

Modern rich internet applications not only generate far more network demand (AJAX, Rich Media), but are also more susceptible to unpredictable performance. As rich internet applications generally offer richer, more frequent interaction with the user, then the more noticeable to a user are changes in application performance. The other issue arises if an organisation is utilising a range of different providers: how they manage these different relationships, and how they integrate these services into their core applications.

The Innovation Group is pleased to report two important new contracts in Australia — Contracts involve both the Group’s Software and BPO capabilities -

The Innovation Group plc (LSE: TIG.L), is pleased to announce that it has signed two new contracts in Australia, utilising the Group’s Business Process Outsourcing (“BPO”) and Software capabilities.

The first contract is a three-year software license agreement with one of Australia’s best known mid tier Property and Casualty Insurers. Under the terms of the agreement, the insurer will utilise the Group’s Innovation Insurer Suite software to implement multiple new lines of business and will also migrate a number of existing legacy systems on to the Insurer platform. This contract is the Group’s first sale of its entire Insurer Suite offering, which includes Claims, Analytics and Policy, also making it the first sale of the new Insurer Policy product. The agreement is expected to generate approximately AU$7.0m (£4.4m) in revenue over its three year period.

The second contract is a three-year software license and BPO agreement with the Australian arm of a global insurance company headquartered in the United States. As part of its agreement with this insurer, the Group will provide its Innovation Insurer Policy software to the insurer’s Australian arm via Software as a Service (“SaaS”) model, as well as hosting the software and providing application support. The Group will also provide the insurer’s Australian arm with outsourced services to support the administration of certain policy types sold through the insurer’s Australian distribution network. This contract, the first to combine Innovation’s software and BPO capabilities, is expected to generate between AU$2.0m and AU$4.8m (£1.25m and £3.0m) in Group revenue over its term, dependent on the volume of policies sold.

Welcoming both deals Andy Roberts, Chief Executive Officer of The Innovation Group added:

“This is excellent progress for us in Australia and for our Group as a whole. These successes validate our investment in the Insurer software platform, which is winning over new customers with its flexibility, capacity and speed of implementation. I am also pleased to unveil further evidence of our ability to win business that involves both of our key service lines. It is this combination of sophisticated software and highly capable service teams which, I believe, sets The Innovation Group squarely apart from its peers.”

Source: 4-Traders.com

By Mark Atterby – Senior Staff Writer

Expense On Demand’s tremendous success and growth over recent years has been due to finding a lucrative niche in the market and staying highly focused on what they do: automating the management of employee expenses and timesheets.

Since its inception in 2005 in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, Expense On Demand now offers its services across 70 countries around the world. Used by hundreds of thousands of users it has international offices in Australia, India, the USA, Singapore and China. Phil Gamble, from Expense On Demand comments, “Expense On Demand is a SaaS provider, we focus purely on employee expenses and timesheets and have no plans to diversify at this time. We offer this service to end users, resellers and BPO providers”.

The administration of employee expenses can be extremely time consuming and costly. “According to Meta Group, over 95% of companies still manage their expenses manually or using spreadsheets,” commented Sunil Nigam, founder of Expense On Demand. The management of employees expenses is a complex corporate procedure that involves both government regulations and employees’ personal time and money.

That’s why organisations such as TNT and Tesco have been turning to Expense On Demand to manage their employee expenses. As an example, TNT’s head office in the UK employs 1200 people. Before implementing an automated system, the manual processing of employee expense claims was placing a large administrative burden on the financial department. They needed to automate this part of their business. At first they considered to expand the scope of their SAP implementation, but found it would be extremely costly so they decided to look at implementing a SaaS solution.

It took a couple of weeks to implement and pilot the Expense On Demand solution. According to Greg Wigmore, the financial controller, utilising a SaaS solution was much easier and cost effect than expanding their SAP solution. He comments on the results, “The need to have two people processing claims was eliminated. By centralising our Accounts Payable, it has given us greater control, greater purchasing power and clearer visibility of spend across the group.”

Phillip Gamble believes that they identified the potential of the market at the right time, “Our advantage is that we’ve entered this market early and with a product that has been built from scratch to be supplied and managed as a hosted service. The benefits we aim to offer are time savings, reduced costs, greater compliance to corporate and regulatory requirements, and better information.

According to Nemertes’ 2010/11 “Communications and Computing Benchmark,” nearly 97 per cent of organisations are currently using or planning to use some form of outsourcing, documenting a solid increase from 2009 when the figure was 85 per cent. Currently, 73 per cent of research participants use managed services (the largest component of outsourcing), up from 65 per cent in 2008. In fact, managed services have seen a tremendous run since 2006, when only 27 per cent of organisations used managed services.

Outsourcing consists of a range of options on a continuum from managed services to hosted services to Software as a Service (SaaS). Managed services typically include outsourcing management of a specific application, technology or function, often including maintenance. Usually, managed services consist of managing onsite equipment at the customer premises, though with a service such as business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR), onsite equipment is at a provider facility. Hosted services deliver applications via either the Internet or dedicated network using MPLS, Carrier Ethernet, or leased line. SaaS is similar to hosted services with the same delivery model. However, SaaS is intrinsically multi-tenant, on-demand, with pay-as-you-go pricing. In comparison, hosted services are often not multi-tenant, on-demand, and typically have multi-year pricing.

Several factors drive the adoption of managed services. The top reason IT staff outsource is to save money, a driver 69.5 per cent of organisations cited. The greatest savings results from reducing the staff and perhaps 24 x 7 facilities to house them. Providers take advantage of economies of scale to offer management and maintenance services at rates lower than it costs organisations to provide the services internally. A lack of staffing skills is the next greatest driver: About 30 per cent of organisations indicate a lack of internal skills as a primary managed-services driver, and about 25 per cent of organisations identify lack of staff as a primary driver. IT leaders often decide against employing staff to manage systems they view as commodities and use those headcounts for more strategic functions.

These drivers directly reflect plans to adopt managed and even hosted services in 2011. The top managed services are for functions seen largely as commodities in IT: Network/router management and IP Telephony. IT leaders who continue to grasp internal control of network/router and IPT management should closely evaluate the cost of outsourcing versus internal management.

As outsourcing projects grow and evolve into larger and more complex undertakings, keeping visibility and transparency of what’s happening in the business becomes a challenge. One of the biggest retardants to outsourcing from the client side is a sense of loss of control. This gap in the market has been addressed by a relatively new service. PPM (Project Portfolio Management) has evolved as a practice and a range of tools, to give greater visibility to the management of large organisations, of the various projects currently being undertaken. PPM can add significant improvements to the outsourcing arrangements client organisations have with their BPO and outsourcing providers.

Wikipedia.org defines PPM as a series of methods and tools for analysing and collectively managing a group of current or proposed projects based on certain key characteristics. PPM tools attempt to enable organisations to manage the continuous flow of projects from concept to completion.

Steve O’Neill, CEO of Sentient Software, a provider of PPM software solutions, “In large organisations there can be a bit of blind faith about what is going on in the business. There are a variety of teams utilising extensive resources to manage various projects and functions within the business. Detailed information may exist at the project and staff level but this does not necessarily roll up to the executive level.”

“PPM gives senior management the visibility and transparency of what is happening across the entire enterprise, enabling greater standardisation, measurement and process improvement”, adds O’Neil.

Prior to founding of Sentient Software, Steve O’Neill had spent his working life employed by large corporations. “Six years ago I saw there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled. Senior management did not have the reporting tools to have a complete understanding of where projects were at, how much resources were being allocated to them, and the value and urgency that needed to be allocated to respective initiatives.”

The enhanced reporting delivered by PPM allows management to prioritise projects based on corporate objectives and strategies, ensuring critical projects are completed before non-essential. Limited resources can be better allocated to where they are needed most, thereby delivering a higher ROI for particular projects.

To achieve its aims, there are a range of features that can be incorporated into a PPM system, some of the more important ones include,

• Project evaluation process or methodology
• Cost and benefits measurement
• Progress reporting
• Risk assessment
• Communication of key project data, e.g. executive dashboard
• Resource and capacity planning
• Cost and benefits tracking

Ensuring Success

Many commercial tools can seem overwhelming at first, simply because of the large amount of functionality they offer. It is advisable to start small, introducing aspects of portfolio management one element at a time. To ensure the success of trying to incorporate PPM into your organisation, you should consider the following:

1. Identify key organisation performance indicators (financial or otherwise) that the PPM initiative will improve.
2. Capture a baseline of data about these indicators.
3. Develop realistic, achievable targets for changes to these indicators.
4. Develop a business case based on these improvements taking into account the hard and soft costs of the PPM initiative.
5. Secure appropriate executive sponsorship to provide you with both the funding and visibility for the project.
6. As Project Portfolio Management changes are rolled out, measure these indicators on a regular basis (as well as the costs of the initiative) and provide annual (or better yet, quarterly) updates to senior management regarding the benefits achieved.

Benefits

In terms of outsourcing, one key benefit of PPM is that it can greatly assist the transitioning phase of the outsourcing arrangement. Transferring the work and business processes from the client to the outsourcing provider, can entail a significant change management and business re-engineering project. O’Neill observes, “In transitioning the work at the beginning of an outsourcing deal or arrangement, organisations are recognising that significant change management issues need to be considered.”

PPM also allows organisations to fully understand what processes and projects should be managed internally and which should be outsourced or managed as a shared service by their provider. On the outsourcer’s side, PPM allows them to better manage the various projects they have going for their clients.

The approaching cloud

Sentient mainly deliver their software via a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. According to O’Neill, cloud computing allows organisations to rapidly automate and deploy key business processes such as project portfolio management, “Most of our customers want their PPM solution delivered via a SaaS model.”

As cloud computing gains momentum, it will change how we view IT and the relationship organisations have with their technology suppliers. It will impact how projects are managed, where instead of rolling out a range of internal IT infrastructure to enable a particular business function, the project will involve the establishment of a relationship with a cloud provider. The business model has greater similarities with outsourcing rather than a vendor-buyer relationship.