Cloud Computing – today’s means of learning

Sevenoaks, February 2010 – “Cloud Computing” is certainly part of the large IT trend this year. Businesses and organisations access applications over the Internet by subscribing to a supplier on a “Software as a Service” (SaaS) basis. This business model is also gaining more and more supporters in the HR field. IMC UK Learning Ltd. offers the new release of its successful Learning Management Systems (LMS) under the name “CLIX 2010” and hence also a “SaaS solution”.

Indeed, the “subscription software” model enjoys great popularity with businesses. 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 so-called multi-tenant architecture in which many organisations share 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.

Even Dirk Thissen, Managing Director of IMC UK Learning Ltd., is convinced that the benefits of learning technologies in the cloud are established as a business model. “In the meantime, there are numerous best practices for SaaS with strong ROI calculations. SaaS can be flexibly adapted to new corporate structures and training requirements, release its own IT and support the concentration on core competencies by transferring business processes to external service providers”. “In addition, companies nowadays do not just have a qualification remit with its own employees. External trade partners, suppliers and customers also have to be trained. Since it is considerably easier if all business partners log in to a protected system over the Internet rather than into their own IT infrastructure to exchange the relevant information in a cumbersome manner afterwards.”

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 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, continues Thissen, the technological aspects of IT applications fade into the background, thus, issues of cost/benefit and the contribution to added value increasingly dominate.” In the end for specialised sectors, it comes down to which SaaS supplier can optimally support the business processes as a service. Which IT architecture is used as the basis for these solutions is subordinate, provided that the basic aspects, for example, data security and service quality are guaranteed. In other words: for the user of a rental car, in essence, only the on-time delivery, period of use, vehicle category, rental costs and condition of the vehicle are relevant, but, however, not a basic orientation of the vehicle technology, much less knowledge about the precise physical functions of petrol engines. SaaS solutions thus foster decentralised decision-making power as well as the autonomy of specialist departments as a “buying centre” for core solutions.