Sunday Business Post - Cork 2008 Supplement - May 25 2008
New healthcare facility would mean people would no longer have to travel from Cork to Dublin for care, writes Dermot Corrigan
Management at Cork’s two voluntary hospitals, Mercy University Hospital (MUH) and South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital (SIVUH), are pressing ahead with plans for a new €500 million merged hospital for Cork city.
SIVUH chief executive Ger O’Callaghan said the two hospitals had met with a number of developers to discuss the possibility of building the new hospital under a public-private partnership, with a site in Cork’s Docklands zone put forward as one possibility.
"Over the last two years the chief executive of the Mercy, Pat Madden, and myself have met with various developers and talks are ongoing," said O'Callaghan. "We are particularly interested in the Docklands development and there are some suggestions there. If tax breaks were available it might go up a lot quicker there."
O'Callaghan said a public-private partnership arrangement was one possibility under consideration.
"We are working on a proposal that might be acceptable to the HSE (Health Service Executive) and would satisfy all parties," he said.
Madden stressed that preserving the voluntary traditions of healthcare provision in Cork was a primary aim in all exploratory discussions.
"This year is the 150th anniversary of the Mercy Hospital in Cork, and there is a proud tradition there of employment and service,” he said. “We want to preserve and protect that ethos, and if there is to be a new hospital we would like it to be based on the voluntary ethos, rather than any other type of model."
The planned 450 bed hospital, first announced last October, will cost €500 million. It will cater for 200,000-plus patients annually, drawn from Cork city, county and the province of Munster.
Madden and O'Callaghan said the venture had the full backing of both hospital's boards, as well as medical staff. They said the new hospital would be a world-class centre of excellence for acute care and be built on core specialties worked by multi disciplinary teams and benchmarked against best international practice.
The new hospital will have fewer beds than the 646 in use in the Mercy and South Infirmary. Madden said this was in line with modern patient care requirements.
"The whole trend is towards shorter times of stay,” he said. “It is now becoming the norm for people to undergo a procedure in the morning and go home that evening. New technology is allowing us to do that."
O’Callaghan said he hoped the capability would exist to treat some patients closer to home in the future.
"There are people coming to acute hospitals that could be looked after in the community," he said. "It would be possible to develop a smaller, learner hospital going forward along with a realignment of services."
He said that facilities at both the Mercy and South Infirmary needed to be upgraded.
"The infrastructure of both hospitals is a problem at the moment, given their ages," he said. "Part of the South Infirmary were built in 1761 and the Mercy Hospital goes back to 1858. While we have state of the art facilities in the hospitals, it is still very difficult to operate in the 21st century in such an environment."
Madden said that the new hospital should mean that people would no longer have to travel from Cork to Dublin to access any type of care.
"The aim would be to bring to the region services which people currently have to travel outside the region to access,” he said. “The south region, including Cork, Kerry, Waterford and Limerick could then be self sufficient in terms of services."
O’Callaghan said full rehabilitation services had been flagged as a valuable addition to the new hospital.
"The area of rehabilitation is a topical area that needs to be developed in the southern region and it may or may not be part of a new development," he said.
Madden and O’Callaghan said they were in regular contact with the HSE regarding the new project.
"We approached the HSE and they have been supportive up till this point," said O'Callaghan. "They have asked Teamwork to look at the region and compile a report. That report is ongoing. But we hope to develop as we feel we should develop, rather than waiting for the report to come out."
O’Callaghan said that some HSE capital funding would be required, regardless of whether the new hospital is run on a voluntary or public / private basis.
"We would need the support of the HSE, given the type of money that would be involved, but we would be confident that this will happen," he said.
Madden said he was confident the project would go through, but declined to give an expected completion date, citing the delays affecting the new National Maternity Hospital project in Dublin.
"You are seeing in Dublin the hoops that people have to go through there," he said.
Sunday 25 May 2008
Plans evolving for €500 million merged hospital
Tuesday 6 May 2008
Funding technology start-ups
Sunday Business Post - Computers in Business - May 04 2008
Read this story on the SBP website by clicking here.
Securing capital for a new business is still possible with the right team and the right idea, writes Dermot Corrigan.
Despite the turmoil global financial markets, Irish entrepreneurs looking for funding support to turn technology ideas into viable businesses have plenty of options.
Late last year, Enterprise Ireland announced that up to €1billion was being made available to Irish entrepreneurs with suitable business ideas in its Enterprise Ireland's (EI) Seed and Venture Capital Scheme 2007-2012. Last year alone, EI supported the establishment of 79 new export-focused high potential startup companies (HPSUs).
The Irish venture capital community is also in the process of launching the next round of their funding cycles. Maurice Roche, partner with venture capitalists Delta Partners, said the credit crunch has not had a major affect on the level of funding available to Irish start-ups.
“The amount of money available from the VC [venture capitalist] community has not dried up,” Roche said. “We have money to invest.”
All of the main banks now have dedicated business start-up packages in place that offer finance to new companies. Damian Young, head of small business segments at Bank of Ireland, said that banks were eager to help entrepreneurs get started with their businesses.
“We ourselves have a developing business loan fund, which we set up just under two years ago,” he said. “Going forward, the market is good for the right businesses.”
Who to approach
Enterprise Ireland is often the first port of call for a technology entrepreneur looking for advice. Tom Hayes, director of the high potential start-ups division, Enterprise Ireland, said that EI welcomed approaches from anyone with an idea.
“We get well over a thousand enquiries a year,” he said. “We will certainly talk to anybody who has the germ of an idea that can develop into something with the potential to sell domestically and internationally. We will provide them with some initial guidance, in terms of how they can secure some early stage funding, and support from ourselves. We will point them in the right direction at a very early stage.”
Incubation and innovation centres are also a useful resource for technology entrepreneurs unsure of where and how to get funding for their idea. The Dublin Business Innovation Centre (DBIC) is a public private partnership, including Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Dublin City Council, Enterprise Ireland and AIB established in 1987, to provide business start-up advice, incubation and access to seed funds.
“We can talk to people over the phone, or face to face,” said John McInerney, project manager with DBIC.
“We have a process that helps to identify the relevance of the entrepreneur, his or her background, the business idea, how far they have got with it so far, and there is a feasibility stage. If the idea qualifies for County Enterprise Board or Enterprise Ireland funding, we would help them put in the application.”
Roche said that venture capital companies were open to approaches from all entrepreneurs.
“It is never too early to talk to a potential funder,” he said. “Even if they say no, you will learn something from them. We operate on the basis that even when we are saying no to businesses, we give them some constructive points to build on.”
Young said banks were also happy to hold early stage negotiations with potential new customers, who were close to bringing their product or service to the market.
“If the company is seeking funding to grow the business, and has secured some contracts, or established a customer base, then bank debt or similar funding would be appropriate,” he said.
“With bank debt, the company does not relinquish a share in the company, and can benefit from support and advice from their relationship manager in their branch. We have relationship managers with particular expertise in technology businesses, so they can get a high level of advice from them.”
Roche said that technology ideas that required a good deal of research and development before a revenue stream was established, tended to take the venture capital route.
“Often with technology businesses first round funding for concepts, prototypes, at a pre-commercial stage, often equity or grant is the route taken,” he said. “Banks will look for a capacity to service the debt.”
Shane Dempsey, director, Irish Software Association, said technology entrepreneurs should talk to as many people as possible before deciding which funding route to take.
“With an increasing number of institutions such as VCs, banks and state agencies, it is important to get impartial objective advice at an early stage,” said Dempsey. “Contacting some other technology entrepreneurs is a good idea. There are many successful serial entrepreneurs in the tech sector who bear the scars of getting funding wrong and will advise you accordingly.”
How to approach
Although it is never too early to make an initial approach, Young said that potential funders wanted entrepreneurs to have clearly thought through their business idea before they considered handing over any cash.
“A business plan is vital,” he said. “It is the road map, but it is also the document that will help you secure investors. Depending on whether it is for a bank or a VC, they might tailor the style of the business plan. The bank will be looking at what this company is going to generate, the VC's perspective is what will it be worth in one year or five years.”
“However, the fundamentals of the business plans would be consistent, including the state of the technology, the management team, the stage the business is at, the market it is focused on, the unique selling proposition, market structure, future projections and so on,” Young said.
A business plan should concentrate on the business potential of the idea, rather than the technological jargon, McInerney said.
“Sometimes a technology business plan can have 60 pages, but 40 of those pages might be explaining the product, and there might be no emphasis on the business concepts,” he said.
“You have to be able to explain the technology in simple terms and you need to have a strong marketing focus, and not recognising that early enough can cause difficulties.”
Hayes said that VCs were more concerned with the size of the market for the product or service than the practical workings of the actual technology.
“You are looking for an opportunity, is there an addressable market of some size or scale,” he said. “Most important of all is the value proposition, what is in it for the customer, whether that customer is an individual consumer or a corporate. What will attract them and make them decide to buy the product or service.”
Technology companies looking for large-scale funding need to be eyeing up international markets, according to Roche.
“The most important thing for us, when we are looking at an opportunity, is the size of the market or how big the market can become,” he said. “You would want to be looking at markets that are at least a couple of hundred mil lion dollars in size and growing aggressively - at 50 to 100 per cent per annum.
“An international focus is vital. You might get your first or second reference country in Ireland, but you need to be selling into international markets shortly after start-up.”
Roche said that while it was a good idea for tech people to get advice from people with more business experience when putting their plan together, the entrepreneur should still write the plan himself.
“You have to put your ideas down on paper and you have to be sure of who owns the plan,” he said.
“Some people will try to put other language around their idea to make it more sellable but, in my view, entrepreneurs need to put down their own points on paper, and they need to own it and believe in what they can do.”
Support
Hayes said many different types of people approach EI for advice on starting a new tech business.
“The kind of people we get can vary enormously, from a very sophisticated team of two or three people with lots of experience of business development, to somebody coming out of a college or a research centre with very little business experience,” he said.
Inventing a groundbreaking new technology product or service and commercialising are two quite different skills. Therefore, potential funders look very carefully at the management team in place in a start-up that approaches them, according to Roche.
“Our ideal management team at the start would be someone who has very specific domain knowledge, in terms of the product, and someone who has very good domain knowledge from a sales and marketing point of view,” he said.
“The technical person can concentrate on building a team to develop the product, while the sales and marketing person will know the market and know how to sell to customers and make business partnerships along the way.”
Many of the different business sources of funding, including EI, the VCs and the banks, will offer business advice or structures to help a technology entrepreneur succeed. One example is the Business Angel Partnership, a joint initiative between Enterprise Ireland, InterTrade Ireland and the Irish Business and Innovation Centres. McInerney, who is programme manager for the Business Angels Partnership, said the scheme gives a technology person access to management expertise and funding, while al lowing them to keep control of their idea.
“The business angel partnership is a combination of business skills and money,” he said. “What you do is build skillsets around the entrepreneur and the idea, adding different skills depending on the stage of development.”
When to begin
McInerney said that, while there was some doom and gloom around the Irish economy at present, this was not necessarily a bad time to start a tech business.
“People would obviously prefer to start a business in a more buoyant economy, and in expanding global market conditions, but Irish start-up businesses tend to be in niche areas which can be less affected by big global events,” he said.
“There is never necessarily a bad time to start a business. Over a five- or seven-year cycle, there will always be ups and downs.” Hayes said technologies that helped large organisations to cut their costs were especially attractive at present.
“Technologies that can provide companies with better efficiencies, or management, or information are attractive to al l enterprises,” he said. “In the current environment all companies, whether they are medium or large, will be looking for these solutions as cost pressures come to bear.”
Roche said new technology ideas with high business potential were always sought after by funders.
“We look at companies right across the technology spectrum - software, hardware, business services, Web 2.0, software-as-a-service companies, telecoms, financial services, enterprise software and media deals,” he said.
Following the latest tech fashion was not a good idea for wannabe technology entrepreneurs, according to Roche.
“Web 2.0 and social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo have been al l the rage, but you have to be there at the point in time,” he said. “The opportunities to create another MySpace are now very limited.”
Roche said that Irish government focus on ‘information economy', in particular into universities and research institutes, should lead to more new technology start-ups going forward.
“We have seen some proposals coming from incubation facilities, and we would expect over the next couple of years to see some more businesses coming through,” he said. “Science Foundation Ireland have spent a lot of money funding research and we would expect over the next couple of years to see business ideas coming forward.”
Hayes said that good technology ideas would always find the money to back them. “There is always scope for entrepreneurship, and there are always resources there for the right idea,” he said.
Graham builds €10m eco-friendly HQ
Sunday Business Post - Done Deal - April 27 2008
Read this story on the SBP website by clicking here.
Northern Ireland construction company Graham is to invest £10 million in a new eco-friendly headquarters building in Hillsborough, Co. Down.
The project-team for the new Graham site also includes architects Building Design Partnership (BDP), planning consultants White Young Green and public relations consultants Strategic Planning.
The building work is expected to be completed within two years, and the project will create approximately 200 jobs. Graham executive chairman Michael Graham said the new facility would highlight the company’s wide range of building, engineering and management capabilities.
‘‘It gives us an opportunity to use the experience we have, not only in design and construction, but also in the management of these type of facilities,” said Graham. ‘‘It allows us to demonstrate all of the things that we do to our clients.”
Graham said the 3,000 square metre, three-storey, glass-fronted building will showcase Graham’s ‘green’ design and construction techniques, including natural air circulation, biomass woodchip burner and sustainable urban drainage system.
‘‘The centre of the building has a full height atrium, that helps with natural ventilation and spreads daylight throughout the building,” he said. ‘‘All the building materials are sourced locally from sustainable sources. We will have computerised co-ordination of all the various systems, to make sure that everything is managed to keep the building at the right temperature and light levels.”
Graham said that the company’s present base, at Dromore, County Down, was now too small.
‘‘We have been in the current location in Dromore for well over a hundred years, and we have just outgrown our facilities,” he said. ‘‘This allows us to create a modern working environment and bring the efficiencies that modern methods can bring, and also improve the working environment for our staff.”
Graham was established in Dromore in 1878, and now employs close to 1,000 employees, with an annual turnover of €290 million. It has interests and projects under way throughout Ireland and Britain, and Graham said it was important for the company to have an all-island presence.
Last March, Graham secured a €45 million contract, in partnership with Co Tyrone-based PT McWilliams, to construct an 8.6-mile dual carriageway bypass around Tullamore, Co Offaly. It is also undertaking the €27.5m Macken Street Bridge project.
Its accomplishments also include the new Football Association of Ireland headquarters at Abbotstown, Dublin 15, and the Dargan Luas bridge in Dundrum.
‘‘We have been working fairly consistently in the Republic since 1997,” Graham said. ‘‘It is a very important market for ourselves, and we have €100m at work on the ground in the Republic. We are very keen to grow, not just in the civil engineering side, but also in construction. Also. we have just secured our first facilities management contracts in Dublin.”
Sunday 6 April 2008
Cloud set to reign
Sunday Business Post - Computers in Business magazine - April 6 2008
Read this story on the SBP website by clicking here.
Utility computing will allow companies to utilise a system that suits their needs, writes Dermot Corrigan.
Many of the services Irish consumers and businesses use on a daily basis are delivered on a utility basis and paid for by usage. For example, we flick a switch and the radio comes on, we turn the tap and water comes out, and we pick up the phone and make a call. Nobody worries about buying a generator to generate electricity, a well to provide drinking water, or their own telephone exchange to connect with the outside world.
It was not always thus. It was only at the end of the 19th century that large utility companies were formed to take the work in generating power, providing water or running the telephone system away from the general user, and provide electricity, water and phone calls as a service.
Now, in the early 21st century, a similar process is underway which, if leading industry figures are to be believed, will mean that soon businesses and consumers will no longer need to have their own computing infrastructure - servers, networks, storage units etc, etc - but will receive and pay for al l of their computing requirements as a service, delivered over an internet connection.
Utility computing is coming.
“The utility computing model is very similar to electricity, gas or telecommunications,” said Ciaran Doherty, sales director at Horizon Open Systems.
“People come in and hit the switch and it comes on. They pay for what they use and they do not pay when they do not use it. A hundred years ago people had generators, but now they are connected to the national grid.”
Doherty maintained that the way IT has been delivered has been evolving in this direction for some time.
“There was facilities management in the 1960s and 1970s and outsourcing in the 1980s and the shift towards application server provision at the height of the dotcom boom and now the shift towards the utility computing model,” he said.
With utility computing, computing resources are consolidated into large systems by the utility providers. Users draw down the computing power they need from a central system as required, instead of having a number of dedicated systems running individual functions or applications in-house.
“Up until a couple of years ago most organisations bought what were referred to as stove-pipe platforms,” said Doherty.
“For example that meant if you were a telecoms provider, you had a particular platform for your SMS solution and a particular platform for your billing solution, and so on. They were al l identical, but they were all just there to support the particular individual function. You only used the testing and development systems when you were testing and developing something. The rest of the time it was just sitting there.”
Until now businesses were required to buy systems that were capable of meeting the company's maximum usage requirement, Doherty said.
“You would buy the platform based on your maximum peak usage at a given point of the year, it could be Christmas or summer or whenever,” he said.
“You needed to be able to deliver your service to your customers at that time, so you needed that maximum computing capacity and you had to purchase that up front to make sure it was there when you needed it.” Most companies therefore had the majority of their computing resources lying idle the majority of the time.
“The utilisation of IT in Ireland is about 25 per cent,” Doherty said. “Companies buy capacity based on peak usage time, whether it is end of month, quarter or end of the year. That is a huge cost, as whether the machine is operating at 95 per cent or 5 per cent of its capacity, it is still costing money to power it, to house it and to manage it. They are very significant costs.”
Cloud computing
IBM is currently investing heavily in utility computing, or ‘cloud' computing as it refers to the concept. Last month it opened Europe's first cloud computing centre in Ireland. The centre, at the IBM Innovation Centre in Dublin, will offer computing power to customers, and will give companies in Europe the ability to use virtual computing power to spur technology research and business development.
The aim of the centre is to replace the traditional data centre model in which companies own and manage stand-alone hardware and software systems, according to Po/l MacAonghusa, business development manager with IBM's strategy, development and innovation team in Dublin.
“We are setting up a lot of hardware here, probably about 100 CPUs [central processing units] in our cloud here in Dublin,” said MacAonghusa. “IBM has built up a framework of software based on our products and various projects we have worked on with partners around the world. We will look after EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa] from Dublin. It is up and running now and we will be hosting our first customer event this month and we will be running live on the cloud here in Dublin.”
MacAonghusa said users utilising the ‘cloud' would just plug in and start to work, without having to invest in and manage all the infrastructure that traditionally comes with a traditional IT solution.
“Cloud computing is a flavour of utility or shared resource computing,” he said. “The analogy that people usually refer to is the internet. You, as the user, are not really aware of the size of the internet. It is all hidden from you behind the browser. Even though there are hundreds of thousands of machines, physically linked together with wire, you really have no view of that. In effect, it is a cloud.”
MacAonghusa said utility computing removed any technical concerns, giving an unhindered user experience.
“I just log on to a nice portal or web interface and say: “For my payroll I would like to use this number of computers'‘.
And the management software would look after al l the physical provisioning of those systems and make them available to me in a matter of minutes,” he said.
“In other words, the management software can dip into the cloud and find you the resources that you need and make them available to you so that you can run your application inside the cloud without worrying about configuring the different systems and applications that are required.”
IBM will offer the use of the ‘cloud' within the Dublin centre to its Irish customers, according to MacAonghusa.
“We will have a utility or cloud computing environment available on demand to Irish clients,” he said.
“We will have a significant services team, involved in client engagements, providing hosted services and we will also have the know-how and personnel available to help them with their projects and make them a success.”
Gaining pace
The utility computing concept is quickly gaining pace. IT giants such as Microsoft, Oracle and Google are working on their own utility computing projects. Smaller Irish companies, such as Hosting 365, are gearing for the arrival of ‘hardware as a service' provision.
GRID Ireland, run by the Higher Education Authority, is connecting university systems together to provide a utility-like service for Irish researchers, while SAP has a research Campus-based Engineering Centre (CEC) in Belfast with links to both the University of Ulster and Queen's University Belfast, which is developing ‘Business Grids' to become the ICT backbone of the future.
Doherty said a number of factors were coming together to encourage the growth of utility computing.
“Virtualisation technology has really taken off - that is, the ability to pool IT server and disk resources together to deliver maximum utilisation on a given platform,” he said.
“The other thing that is happening is the concept of software as a service. This was one of the blockers to utility computing over the years because everybody had bought perpetual licenses for their software. They were paying for that license, typically on a per-user basis or a PC basis. You bought it and you could use it forever. All the global software vendors are stampeding to get into software as a service licensing models.”
Doherty said that anyone buying software as a service, or on-demand software products, such as salesforce.com's CRM solutions, was in effect already getting into utility computing.
“If you are buying software as a service, well then the underlying platform is going to be delivered as a service,” he said.
“In essence then you are buying your computing power as a service, and your CRM and your ERP as a service. That is driving the whole thing forward.” Software providers are pushing the idea of SaaS and utility computing, as it makes business sense for them.
“They are all trying to get recurring revenues and predictability in their own revenue cycle,” Doherty said. “If you have customers who are paying you on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis, that is guaranteed revenue, so Wall Street love it.”
Hooking up to grid
Doherty said that most businesses should be interested in utility computing, as it has the potential to move investment in IT from the capital budget to the day-to-day expenses.
“The customers love it themselves, because you are reducing their capital costs substantially,” he said. “They are only paying for capacity when and where you need it.”
Utility computing al lows managers to see exactly how much their computing power is costing, and clearly relate their IT expenditure to the returns generated, according to Doherty.
“Utility computing allows people to map IT directly onto business value,” he said. “You are paying for IT directly in line with the business value that arises from it.”
MacAonghusa said there was potential for IBM's existing Irish customers to migrate from their current in-house servers or data centres into the new cloud model.
“The individual IBM client teams will work with their clients to decide whether to do that,” he said.
“The capability is there, for a certain number of customers, particularly in the small and medium sized business sector, cloud may well be a serious consideration, because it allows them either to go for a hosted service where IBM could manage their IBM resources with them, or the cloud offers them an opportunity to begin to optimise their own resources.”
Doherty said most companies would move gradually from their existing hardware infrastructure towards the utility model.
“People are going to get into utility computing based on their use of specific applications,” he said.
“If you are an SME you could easily get into this environment, rather than purchasing software in the traditional manner you purchase it on a subscription basis. You are logging on via the web to use that application and at the same time you are paying for hardware that is running that on a subscription basis.”
MacAonghusa said that as companies required more and more computing power, they would be drawn to the utility model.
“From our own experience we have seen that as a team grows, the number of servers required to keep everybody happy grows quite dramatically,” he said. “A lot of these server machines are under utilised, so the cloud allows you a way of consolidating a number of servers so that more and more applications can use them.”
Impact on IT
One reason why some companies were slow to recognise the merits of utility computing was that it was viewed as a threat by IT professionals within organisations, Doherty said.
“It reduces your need to have a level of expertise in house and the need for complex and expensive hardware installation,” he said. “So IT departments saw utility computing and managed services as threats to their own jobs and environment.”
This situation is changing, however.
“They now realise they can offload a lot of the general, mundane tasks that they were doing in relation to operational upkeep, and now focus on the more strategic end of the business from an IT perspective,” said Doherty.
Software-as-a-service: accessing a global market
Enterprise Ireland's ebusinesslive.ie newsletter - March 25 2008
Read this feature on the ebusinesslive.ie website by clicking here.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) model has become an increasingly viable way for companies to run their IT systems, and for Irish software developers to sell their products. The SaaS model involves the delivery of applications as a service over the internet rather than on a CD that has to be installed on the customer's server, network or PC.
The concept of SaaS was pioneered by US customer relationship management (CRM) software developer Salesforce.com in 1999 and has developed quickly since then. SaaS or 'on-demand' models are now used to deliver a wide range of software products, from accounts packages to word processors to video editors.
Customer advantages
Cork-based telecoms software business VoiceSage has developed a product under the SaaS model that allows clients to make automated telephone calls to their customers. VoiceSage's director of innovation, Paul Sweeney, said SaaS offers many advantages to customers.
"The typical benefits are speed of implementation and ability to buy IT as product," said Sweeney. "Why bother with an install when I can get everything I need, right now, and I know that it works? People are buying a pre-packaged benefit, that they can measure and experience quickly."
Companies using SaaS also encounter negligible in-house support costs, according to Sweeney. "A software-as-a-service solution will not need IT service support, so your IT guy does not need training and does not have one more piece of kit to support."
But before embarking down the SaaS route, you must ensure you have an IT set-up that allows you to take full advantage of the model. Companies using the internet to access an application must have fast, reliable and secure access, says Sweeney. "If you have heavy information or data crunching you may experience some delays. This can be frustrating to users, especially if you are looking to execute a trade or answer a live customer query. In some situations you may want to conduct a security audit. This is especially true if [you] are executing anything to do with credit cards."
Developing models
The SaaS model also makes increasing sense to software developers themselves. Sweeney says VoiceSage always planned to sell its products as a service. "SaaS was central to our whole vision right from the start. We knew that the trend for SaaS would take off."
VoiceSage's products are marketed as business problem-solvers, not as IT solutions. Sweeney says the SaaS model allows software companies to offer a flexible and adaptable product to customers. "We built the software to be pure SaaS, so it could be simply integrated with other systems. We also knew that the adoption cycles were likely to be more favourable for hosted solutions, and it scaled from a business point of view."
'iTunes' for business
As well as supplying the delivery method for SaaS products, the internet can also be used by Irish companies to market and sell their solutions. Last year Salesforce.com launched a service called AppExchange, which allows any company to sell online any SaaS product that is compatible with its CRM software.
"AppExchange is a lot like iTunes - it is a place where anyone can go and see if there is something they can use," says Colm Mulcahy, CEO of Saaspoint, an Irish company certified to deliver Salesforce.com solutions. "It is a very good place for people to go and identify applications they can simply download at a very low cost."
AppExchange only accepts applications compatible with Salesforce.com products, but Mulcahy said a wide range of applications are suitable, from billing software and business intelligence reporting solutions to project management applications. "Salesforce.com audits the application submitted to make sure it has the right standards and fits within their environment," he said.
Global window
According to Salesforce.com, there are currently around 800 applications available on AppExchange. Skype, Cisco and Google have all developed and uploaded applications to the platform. Saaspoint itself has three applications available on the platform, and Mulcahy says any Irish developer with a good product could compete with these IT giants on an equal footing.
"If you are a small software operation, with maybe one or two developers working on a particular application, and you publish it on the AppExchange, you have access to a global market," he says. "One of our applications - a timesheet and expense application called TimeTrack - is generating approximately 100 inquiries for us each month."
Once the application has been accepted and uploaded, anyone can access the software through the AppExchange portal. Customers typically download a free trial of the product, and then deal directly with the developer if they are interested in purchasing it. "There is a licence price per user and the customer will engage directly with the developers and pay them directly for the licenses they use," explains Mulcahy.
Last year, Saaspoint founder Frank McCracken told an Enterprise Ireland Summit in Dublin that SaaS represented both an opportunity and a threat to the Irish software sector. "The big barrier to international success has been the ability to distribute [software] globally. This problem can be solved by using internet platforms. Suddenly companies of any size, no matter how small, have access to a real platform for global distribution."
