Adrian Di Marco, founder and executive chairman of TechnologyOne, kicked off its Evolve conference this morning with a polite warning to its more than 2200 delegates – niche, homegrown cloud players, and suppliers will not survive the coming revolution.
Di Marco was not unkind when he likened hosting providers to the cottage industries that disappeared with the second stage of the industrial revolution. He was simply stating facts when he said that bigger players now were needed.
He outlined new targets for TechnologyOne’s future direction in cloud and SaaS, confirming its cloud revenues are growing by more than 100% year-on-year.
“We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to create a software architecture and an underpinning production line of servers that can serve up our enterprise software as a service, to thousands of customers simultaneously. This will provide our customers with massive economies of scale and will enable customers to take advantage of new technology paradigms, simplify their computing model, reduce costs, improve efficiencies and focus on their business,” Di Marco said.
“There are only a few companies globally offering true enterprise software as a service, which has changed the competitor landscape for us,” he said.
{loadposition ray}In this new cloud-first, mobile-first world, TechnologyOne no longer saw traditional multinational vendors such as Oracle and SAP as competitors and was increasingly coming up against fast-growing SaaS players such as Workday.
Di Marco added that the world was at the start of the next stage of the industrial revolution; the digital revolution and the creation of a digital economy. The remainder of the article comprises extracts from his opening address.
"The physical world around us today is based on the economies of scale delivered by mass production, brought about by the second stage of the industrial revolution when electricity and mass production came to life. In today’s world we have massive power generators that power the factories; delivering the benefits of mass production to us.
"With the digital revolution, massive infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services will allow software factories (that is, SaaS vendors like TechnologyOne) to deliver the benefits of mass production in the software industry. Hosting providers are akin to the cottage industries that disappeared with the second stage of the industrial revolution.
"There are only a handful of vendors actually able to provide true enterprise SaaS, and we see significant challenges for many of those competitors. While their architecture is multi-tenanted, the data is also multi-tenanted, which means that all customers' data is stored together. This is going too far as it poses a huge security risk for customers; we believe the future is in providing multi-tenanted software, in a single-tenant database.
"Also, these new companies don’t have the breadth or maturity of software as we do. The software isn’t built for mobile devices from the ground up, meaning users get a different, and often limited experience on mobile.
"TechnologyOne is the only enterprise vendor guaranteeing to deliver 100% of our enterprise software on smart mobile devices - with no carve-outs and no exceptions. This provides customers with access to the full functionality of our software on any device, anywhere, at any time.
"There’s no denying that the market is accelerating towards SaaS. The past 24 months has seen more than 150 cloud customers signing up for our enterprise SaaS solution.
"This growth is across all industries, from the federal government to local government, education and financial services.
"In fact, our largest wins in 2016 have all been SaaS deals. This alone speaks volumes towards this market shift. We’re now providing businesses with economies of scale and a level of simplicity that has never before been possible."