Sevenoaks (UK), March 2010 - "Cloud Computing" is certainly part of the large IT trend this year. In keeping with this trend, IMC UK Learning Ltd is now offering the new release of its learning management system (LMS) under the name "CLIX 2010"; the system is also a "SaaS solution".
Indeed, the "subscription software" model enjoys great popularity with businesses. Firms and organisations access applications over the Internet by subscribing to a supplier on an SaaS basis. This model is also gaining an ever-increasing number of supporters in the HR field.
In contrast to the classic software business, expenditure does not lie significantly with the company using it, but with the SaaS supplier. It provides its product by means of what is known as "multi-tenant architecture", in which many organisations share the horizontally and vertically scalable infrastructure equally.
The supplier takes care of the installation, configuration, maintenance, and updating of the software. In principle, customers no longer pay for the technology, but for the service, whose quality becomes the focus. Due to the fact that suppliers of SaaS solutions are largely responsible for the seamless operation of an application, they have an increased interest in the reliability of their products.
As a consequence, this has lead to high-quality software: this incorporates continuous application with patches and updates, automatic back-up of files, simple operation of the software, and high availability.
At the same time, considerable savings develop on the customer side. Absolute IT costs are reduced, investment costs change to operating costs, deployment phases are reduced, access to applications is speeded up, and IT alignment optimised. The simple way of up and down-sizing business processes, therefore, makes SaaS attractive to businesses, particularly in economically difficult times.
Medium-sized enterprises, in particular, are offered promising market opportunities with the SaaS model. Small and medium-sized enterprises are highly specialised in their field; IT experts are, by contrast, usually not. SaaS applications and outsourced IT processes, therefore, meet this need very well.
The new CLIX 2010, which as a classic license model, is offered both as an Application Service Providing (ASP) and as an SaaS solution, allowing you to use modern software solutions and, at the same time, concentrate on your core business.
"With the increasing dissemination of SaaS solutions, the technological aspects of IT applications fade into the background; thus, issues of cost/benefit and the contribution to added value increasingly dominate", comments Dirk Thissen, Managing Director of IMC UK Learning Ltd.
In the end, for specialised sectors, it comes down to which SaaS supplier can optimally support the business processes as a service. SaaS solutions thus foster decentralised decision-making power as well as the autonomy of specialist departments as a "buying centre" for core solutions.
