Cloud Computing

web3 – source to pay (S2P) – a new paradigm in the mid-market: Sapphire Systems

The internet has been a liberating medium for all kinds of reasons, but the growth of ‘on-demand’ applications is especially notable because it puts sophisticated applications within the reach of mid-market companies. It’s a great ‘leveller’, allowing mid-sized organisations and their larger cousins to compete on an equal footing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of purchasing. And it’s not simply a matter of automating existing approaches and methods – the internet has re-defined purchasing. The result, for those that wish to grasp the opportunity, is both gamechanging and rewarding. Purchasing can be something of a backwater in mid-sized enterprises. It is often mistakenly assumed that purchasing ‘muscle’ and influence is the sole preserve of large organisations that can use multi-million pound budgets to strike bargains and drive down supplier costs. Added to which, few mid-sized businesses employ dedicated purchasing professionals.

Why Software as a Service?: DCS

According to global IT research firm Gartner, the annual cost to own and manage software applications can be up to four times the cost of the initial purchase. As a result, companies end up spending more than 75% of their total IT budget just on maintaining and running existing systems and software infrastructure (Timothy Chou, ‘The End of Software’, SAMS Publishing, 2005, page 6). With the introduction of computers, companies have accepted this as a cost of doing business. The number of software applications that a company may need are infinite. The resources to operate these applications, however, are finite. The Software as a Service (SaaS) revolution allows companies to subscribe to software applications and outsource operating the back-end infrastructure to the SaaS supplier. In most cases, the SaaS supplier can do this much more cost-effectively; providing overall cost savings for the company. As a result, companies can spread their IT budget across many more applications to support and grow their business operations, which will in turn contribute to the bottom line.

ERP for small and mid-sized companies: time for a decision: itelligence

You are reading this because you have decided that it is time to reconsider the software used to manage your business. If your firm is like most, you have acquired a series of applications over the years to run different aspects of the business. You have invested valuable time and money into making these applications work in the way that your business needs to work. In addition, you’ve expected a measurable return on your investments. But the bottom line is that your business has reached a point where a decision must be made: to continue building on top of the systems that have helped you reach this point, or to revamp and revitalise your business with ERP software. Until very recently, ERP was rarely considered for use in smaller firms. Its core benefits – better business management through co-ordinated and standardised information and analysis – were too often outweighed by the costs and complexities of ERP systems, many of which were engineered for large enterprises.