Information technology has had to develop fast to keep pace with our twenty-first-century working practices. It’s not just that we now expect uninterrupted access to the internet wherever we are in the world; these days we also want instant access to all our corporate documents and data – and we don’t want to have to travel with vulnerable hard drives or negotiate remote server access in order to get it.

But until relatively recently it was difficult and expensive for companies to guarantee their employees secure, or even instant, access to their company files while on the move or at home.

All that began to change in the late 1990s when former Oracle executive Marc Benioff established Salesforce.com, the now ubiquitous web-hosted customer relationship management (CRM) system. By allowing company sales teams to access and update client data while on the move, Salesforce.com not only provided the missing link when it came to information access, it also changed the way that businesses thought about and used technology on the internet.

Software as a service

The success of Salesforce.com was built on one simple proposition. Rather than require companies to overload longsuffering servers with new applications and potentially harmful requests for off-site document access, it bypassed company servers completely by hosting the system and the data it contained in a secure off-site location. And the best thing about it was that it could be accessed from anywhere, at any time, by any authorised user, so long as they could connect to the internet.

Of course, the concept had been around a long time before Salesforce.com hit the marketplace, but it played an important role in illustrating to companies that the ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) model could not only be a secure and dependable way of sharing data, but also a means of driving efficiencies in the way their staff worked and shared information within the business.

Since then the technology has extended into many different areas of corporate and personal information management thanks to the ease with which it can be installed. The Google Apps software suite, which includes the hugely popular consumer email application Gmail, is based on an SaaS model. So too is WebEx, the provider of online meeting and web conferencing facilities. Microsoft has also entered the SaaS market recently with its Business Productivity Online Suite, the web-hosted version of the software giant’s classic Office applications.

By early March 2009, pharmaceutical multinational GlaxoSmithKline had signed up to deploy the full Online Suite to its 100,000 employees worldwide. At the time, Ingo Elfering, vice president of IT Strategy at GlaxoSmithKline, estimated that it would cut IT costs by as much as 30%, as well as improve employee productivity.

From strength to strength

Experts are predicting that the current economic climate is likely to drive further growth in this sector, particularly in the workplace. Market research firm IDC has raised its projected SaaS annual growth rate for 2009 from 36% to 40.5%, arguing that the recession will encourage more businesses to choose subscription-based software services over the more costly inhouse installations. It expects nearly 45% of US firms to spend at least a quarter of their IT budgets on SaaS by 2010, an increase of 23% compared to 2008.

Meanwhile, technology research firm Gartner Inc estimates that companies spent $5.1bn on SaaS programs in 2007 worldwide. It expects that figure to double by 2011.

The flexibility and capabilities of the SaaS model have already been applied to the professional service industries, including those available to the legal sector. Tried-and-trusted SaaS applications now exist that provide web-based case analysis and evidence management, legal practice management, and electronic and document discovery.

CPA Global’s FoundationIP is also one such model. Designed to meet the needs of IP professionals, both in-house and in private practice, it provides an online environment in which to manage IP portfolio information and activities by authorized stakeholders both inside and outside the organisation. Special features include substantive legal updates to ensure that key renewals deadlines are better monitored or managed internally; access rights to enable authorised third parties, such as external counsel or agents, to input information on the owner’s behalf; and a reporting function that provides management teams with the ability to audit their complete IP portfolios at the touch of a button.

Like other SaaS applications, the key here is speed of access, cost and scalability of use. SaaS is a hosted service which means it avoids the front-loaded costs of the traditional software model, which has to be bought, installed and maintained on a company’s premises. The service is based on a system that is already running and fully tested, which means SaaS can be deployed quickly too.

In addition, SaaS applications are usually available for a monthly subscription fee, so that companies are able to project and control outgoing costs. Companies only pay for what they use and are able to scale up and down as their business evolves. In return for the subscription fee, the SaaS vendor is responsible for all the software infrastructure and security support services, as well as future upgrades.

As our working practices continue to evolve in line with our business needs, it is going to become even more important for us to work on the move or at home. There’s nothing more frustrating for IP professionals than not being able to access key data as and when they need it, but the risk of data breaches has always limited the way in which we’ve been able to do that in the past. Thanks to the SaaS model, however, those security concerns have finally been resolved.

Neil Berrecloth is a business development manager in CPA Global’s Software Solutions division. For more information about SaaS, email him at foundationip@cpaglobal.com

This article was first published in IP Review, issue 25

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