26 Jul 2010

A recent International Data Corporation (IDC) study shows that the Software as a Service (SaaS) market had worldwide revenues of $13.1 billion in 2009. IDC forecasts the market to reach $40.5 billion by 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 25.3%. By 2012, IDC expects that less than 15% of net-new software firms coming to market will ship a packaged product (on CD). By 2014, about 34% of all new business software purchases will be consumed via SaaS, and SaaS delivery will constitute about 14.5% of worldwide software spending across all primary markets.

“The SaaS model has become mainstream, and is quickly coming to dominate the planning – from R&D, to sales quotas, to partnering, channels and distribution — of all software and services vendors,” said Robert Mahowald, vice president, SaaS and Cloud Services research at IDC. “Enterprise IT plans are rapidly shifting to accommodate the growing choices for sourcing most or all IT software functions, from business applications to software development and testing, to service and desktop management, as SaaS services become available from established vendors and new models for accessing functionality in the cloud creates lower-cost options and more tailored models for consuming IT services.”

Additional key findings from IDC’s latest SaaS research include the following :

• By 2012, nearly 85% of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery; by 2014, about 65% of new products from established ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services.
• SaaS-derived revenue will account for nearly 26% of net new growth in the software market in 2014.
• Traditional packaged software and perpetual license revenue are in decline and IDC predicts that a software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7 billion decline in worldwide license revenue in 2010. As a result, a permanent change in software licensing regime will occur.
• SaaS segment mix will shift toward infrastructure and application development and deployment/PaaS, and away from U.S. dominance. IDC expects that by 2014, applications will account for just over half of market revenue. This shift will happen in part as a result of increasing IT cloud spending by enterprise IT groups and commercial cloud services providers (cloud SPs) relative to end-user spending.This IDC study, Worldwide Software as a Service 2010–2014 Forecast: Software Will Never Be the Same (IDC #223628) presents IDC’s first look at worldwide SaaS software performance in 2009 and anticipated performance through 2014.

James Brown – Managing Director at Click Innovation comments “this is no suprise to us, SaaS is the way forward, our crm software, contact management software, business management software and small business software applications are all sold as a service.”

July 22, 2010

Worldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue within the enterprise application software market is forecast to surpass $8.5 billion in 2010, up 14.1 percent from 2009 revenue of $7.5 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The rapid adoption of SaaS has contributed to growth in varying degrees across the enterprise software markets. There will be a shift in total SaaS revenue from just over 10 percent of the combined markets in 2009, to more than 16 percent of these combined markets in 2014.

Gartner defines SaaS as software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. The provider delivers an application based on a single set of common code and data definitions, which is consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers anytime on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on use metrics.

“After a decade of use, adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets. As tighter capital budgets demand leaner alternatives, familiarity with the model increases, and interest in platform as a service and cloud computing grows,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner. “Adoption varies between and within markets, and although use is expanding to a wider range of applications and solutions, the most widespread use is still characterized by horizontal applications with common processes, among distributed virtual workforce teams and within Web 2.0 initiatives.”

During 2009 and 2010, the significant industry buzz surrounding SaaS and other off-premises models has shifted to cloud computing – a broad concept, of which SaaS is only one variation, representing the application layer of the overall cloud architectural stack. Gartner estimates that 75 percent of the current SaaS delivery revenue could be considered as a cloud service, and that could exceed 90 percent by 2014 as the SaaS model matures and converges with cloud services models.

“The popularity of SaaS has increased significantly within the past five years and initial concerns about security, response time, and service availability have diminished for many organizations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become more widespread,” Ms. Mertz said.

“Usage and vendors’ on-demand ‘ecosystems’ continue to evolve to provide additional business and technology services, more-vertical-specific functionality, and stronger communities of partners and buyers,” Ms. Mertz said. “Although some attrition occurred in 2009 due to business workforce reduction, nearly all SaaS vendors grew revenue, even during the economic downturn, as buyers continued to confirm their acceptance of on-demand. We certainly expect adoption of SaaS to far outpace market growth through 2014.”

Although use and adoption continues to grow, deployment of SaaS still varies between the enterprise application markets and within specific market segments because of buyer demand and applicability of the solution.

The project and portfolio management (PPM) SaaS market is rapidly growing in percentage of sales. SaaS alternatives may help to grow the overall PPM market again rather than cannibalizing on-premises sales; however, some SaaS revenue growth will be at the expense of on-premises license, as several new entrants to the market are able to provide solutions at less than the cost of maintenance on more mature solutions.

The content, communications and collaboration (CCC) market continues to show the widest disparity of SaaS revenue generation, with SaaS representing 4 percent of enterprise content management (ECM) and approximately 82 percent of Web conferencing in 2009.

SaaS continues to penetrate the customer relationship management (CRM) market, accounting for nearly 24 percent of total CRM market revenue in 2009. SaaS in CRM exhibits more-general market adoption, ranging between 11 percent and nearly 40 percent of total software revenue, depending on the CRM subsegment. SaaS is forecast to account for 26 percent of CRM market total revenue in 2010.

“The market landscape for on-demand CRM continues to evolve and mature as the availability and use of SaaS solutions becomes more pervasive,” Ms. Mertz said. “Greater market competition and increased focus by the megavendors reinforces the legitimacy of on-demand, mitigating initial objections about security and availability for many, as acceptance of SaaS as a viable model for enterprise computing services grows.”

The advantage is that it allows a lot more functionality than a standard webshop and is fully supported and set up by one supplier.

Transactions can be tracked, contacts are automatically added to the contact management module and all orders follow a predefined and measured order delivery process. ClickHQ facilitates email marketing campaigns to those customers in order to cross and upsell.

For more information on this excellent service please call us on 0845 88 00 203.

Generally you get charged extra for support and have to engage the services of an expensive systems integrator.

The Click HQ service is based on software that has been written specifically for SME’s based on real business experience and is supported for no extra cost by the people that wrote it. There is no need for system integrators as we offer a one company solution. If our software does not address a particular business issue we can build a very cost effective module to your exact requirements at a good price and build it into Click HQ.

These days Internet access is fast and available both in the office and on the move, so a hosted software solution makes a lot of sense.

Our ClickHQ “business in a box” software service is designed to work as one system where information only has to be entered once and provides our customers with a good structure within which to run their businesses.

So if you have a specific business issue and it can’t be solved by our standard software, we can help you resolve that issue by writing a bespoke module that can be seamlessly integrated with our ClickHQ service. – Or stand alone if required.

Because our service is pretty comprehensive anyway, our charges are not expensive and can be a very cost effective way of not only solving one pressing issue but will result in increased efficiencies across your business.

Finding new staff is expensive and training them so that they are effective takes time, money and actually reduces the efficiency of your existing staff in the short term.

The Click HQ Business Management Software service facilitates collaboration between the members of your team in order for them to be:

• more effective on behalf of your company
• more involved in making vital business decisions and therefore more committed
• better informed as to what is going on in all areas of your business

Our service includes all the usual features that you would expect to find in a traditional CRM solution in terms of recording and tracking communication with prospects, customers and suppliers. However it is built around better internal communication on the basis that your businesses employees are your biggest asset and probably one of your biggest costs.

We recognise that if you have a motivated and well informed team then your organisation will be more efficient, as well as more effective than your competition and that your recruitment costs will be reduced by retaining a motivated team.

We achieve a more motivated and loyal team by the way our solution engages your staff. To start with each member of your team has a photo so that they are visible within the business, secondly they have a profile so their job title, job description, department, blog and recent activity is also visible across your business. Thirdly our service includes a forum for open discussion on any subject which needs discussing and problem solving which gives all staff a voice where contribution can be recognised by peers and management alike.

How many times in business do all the members of your team get to contribute so openly without inviting them all to endless meetings where their day job gets neglected.

By using blogs people can keep others informed about projects that they are working on and with one click any blog can be published onto your website, if appropriate, which in turn helps google to recognise expertise and bring relevant, interested visitors to your website.

When you peel away the layers the difference between good businesses and resounding success stories is normally down to a well led,informed, empowered and motivated team – our product can help to facilitate this in your business!

Get in touch to find out more.

All of the management team have spent their careers building, managing and developing SME businesses and so have experienced first hand the challenges that you, our customer faces when choosing and implementing business systems.

ClickHQ is new and fresh and more importantly empowers your team by making their jobs easier to do so that they buy into the service which is half the battle won with any system deployment.

So why are we different here at ClickHQ

Firstly we have designed and written our software from scratch based on real business experience gained while running fast growing profitable SME’s.

Secondly the clickhq solution is a simple to use, end-to-end application that will deliver at the click of a button the very latest information on any aspect of your business, this powerful tool will empower and motivate your team and give them a real face and voice within the business.

ClickHQ utilises established social networking techniques to embrace the way that business is conducted today. Collaboration between your customers, employees, suppliers and partners is key to achieving success in this new networked economy.

ClickHQ’s goal is to enable you to make better, faster decisions: we do this by deploying a single seamless solution that will unite your departments and automate and track your processes.

We achieve all of this by taking complete responsibility for your solution, we work with you at the start of the process to define all of your requirements for the service, we then build a tailored solution that we host and manage on your behalf 247.

We remove the need for expensive systems integration and separate software license agreements or indeed managing a third party hosting provider. All of this is delivered for a one off set up fee and a monthly license fee per user. We don’t charge extra for support and are always available at the end of the phone if you need help.

Find out more today by registering online for a free trial, or call to arrange a visit from a ClickHQ Business Consultant.

So why do SEO?
The reasons are simple:
1. 70% + of searchers click on the natural results rather than the paid results.
2. With natural listings you don’t pay every time that someone clicks on your advert.
3. Being ranked highly in the natural results gives you an intangible credibility with searchers. – They trust the likes of Google to find them the most suitable links to their search query.

SEO campaigns are an ongoing process rather than a onetime hit which you have to expect to continue on a monthly basis.
Firstly your Website has to be spider friendly. Google and the other search engines have spiders or robots which trawl the Internet and the code, linking structure, key word or phrase density etc.. on the site has to be easily and clearly interpreted by these spiders.
Secondly you need to keep the content on your website fresh and unique.
Thirdly there is the offsite work which adds credibility to your Website by providing links into your site from other relevant sites, directories, blogs, article sites etc…
The search engine spiders constantly trawl the Internet and if they see sites that they deem as credible that link to your site, especially if they relate closely to what you do or sell, then your site will become more credible itself.
All these factors and many others combine to get your site further up the pages in the likes of Google which in time can bring you huge amounts of visitors, customers and hence profit.
You can’t spend your marketing resources in a more targeted and measurable way than in your online marketing budget.
We will report back on the results of our SEO Campaign for Kata Rocks and others in later blogs.

We had a sales prospecting program called ACT and later Goldmine which we also used as a CRM system, a Sage accounts package, a bespoke billing system and a HR system.
This set up caused lots of issues down the line which really resulted from us being too busy with all the things you do as a new business rather than taking the time to plan. We were being successful in terms of growth and were building a good business but with hindsight could have been a lot more efficient if we had planned more and had had the experience that the 8 years of running the business later gave us.
All the founding directors had good experience in different areas but none of us had started and run a business where we had to look after multiple customers, suppliers, and employees.
We shot from the hip on the move and didn’t use any consultants or have any Non Execs to advise us as we wanted to use all our funds to grow a sales team.
The major problems were:
1. Synchronising data from the sales and telesales teams – ACT was great when used as a single user version to track an individuals own prospects but when we had to synchronise different databases from our different teams it was a nightmare. As we grew we needed to buy numerous consultancy days from expensive systems integrators to add custom fields and to generally make the system fit our business. We also had issues of salesman working remotely accessing the system and spent lots of man hours enabling them to work efficiently.
2. The Customer Services Department used a further customised CRM version of ACT/Goldmine which could record information in custom fields but had no inbuilt logical processes to follow with a simple overview.We were trying to make a simple flat database product fit our business which was dynamic and changing. It worked but only just and we lost a lot of time and things slipped through the net which were very costly. We couldn’t record and measure the time taken between process steps to highlight bottle necks in our processes – we had blind spots and were growing too quickly to notice until it cost us money. The other problem for customer support staff was that they could not access the billing system. They couldn’t see what a customer had been charged for in previous periods or had paid because they didn’t have access to Sage either. Information had to be entered twice and mistakes were made and the people who may have noticed the mistakes couldn’t see the other side. Basically our staff looking after customers were not empowered to do their jobs properly which meant that customers were not getting the best service and we probably lost some customers as a result.
3. All the information put in the billing system was only viewable by 3 people out of 65 staff and there was no automatic link to update payments in. Things got messy when our customers increased or decreased the number of items that we billed them monthly for because there were 2 different systems to be updated manually. Even worse there were occasions that we didn’t bill customers for all the products that they had. We had to carry out regular, time consuming audits to make sure that we billed for the no. of products that our CRM system said we should.
4. Sage is great for Accountants but to the non financial managers it is difficult to interrogate and get meaningful information out of. In my experience this leaves managers and directors without up to date financial information while they wait for weekly or monthly management accounts/reports which are provided to them by their FD, Book Keeper or Accounts Department.
5. Our simple HR program was only accessible by our HR manager and she was part time! We had to wait for her to be in the office and not in interviews with potential new staff before we could get HR notes out of the system.

There were lots of other system problems relating to a lack of access to relevant employees, a lack of flexibility and expensive bespoke programming.
Another big problem was the resilience of the servers in our office, access to information when out of the office and the security of our data.

All the above issues prayed on my mind at the time but there really wasn’t a proper alternative for us to consider at the time.

When we were writing the specification for ClickHQ it was obvious that we should build a service which seamlessly integrated all the modules needed to efficiently run a business from day to day.

Whilst not perfect for everybody, in my perhaps biased view, ClickHQ will save you both time and money because it was written by people like you that have walked the walk and learnt from their mistakes.

Good luck!