Considering last week's HR Teach conference in Amsterdam:
A few clear trends, some really good news, and some of the same old problems leave me boarding the plane back to London in a positive mood and looking forward to interesting new challenges. Here are the trends:

1) HR Analytics is high on the agenda and technology like in memory analytics are now gaining track to provide actual user outcomes. Latest software offers a lot, but many companies still struggle to get the data ready and ask the right questions.

2) SaaS in HR is a fact now. It is changing the market and Workday's entry into continental Europe seems another strong driver of change to me. However, whilst it may cut implementation time by more than 50%, the challenges in integration, process and change don't go away with SaaS. There is a risk of a good trend suffering, because expectations are set too high with senior execs believing a Could based HRIS as almost plug-and-play just as the Dropbox app on their iPhones – a belief they might be forgiven listening to the sales pitches of some vendors. We also see various approaches to SaaS. Oracle, as always boasts to be the top player, but doesn’t seem to be ready for pure multi-tenancy SaaS, whilst SAP looks almost too modest when announcing changes coming with Career on demand. Most established SaaS vendors coming from one specific process (like recruitment) try to broaden their base, whilst other niche players often rebrand traditional hosting solutions as SaaS without changing much.

3) User experience is a big topic. Some of the new SaaS vendors set new standards for better user interfaces and traditional vendors follow. But the most intuitive user interfaces and "gamification" approaches will not drive adoption, unless users understand what their contribution to the organisation as a whole is, and what's in it for them. Technology, strategy and communication need to come together.

4) The most eye-catching trend probably was the integration of social media into Human Capital Management. This is really only just starting and we'll see quite a few surprises, positive as well as negative ones, along the way. Talent attraction and selection are obvious applications, as are internal communications and knowledge sharing, but there is more in it. As off today, social media applications in HR are mostly stand alone with slim, if any, interfaces to established HR systems. HRIS vendors start making efforts to integrate social media, but we may just as well see platforms like Linkedin pushing vendors of recruitment software out of business. At the moment, it feels all a bit chaotic. Some organisations see it as just another way for pushing information from the top down their hierarchies and they'll probably fail. But the potential is huge. Watch this space!

Click here for interview on SAP Career on Demand with David Ludlow.

We are looking forward to watching how SAP on Career Demand develops and how competitors respond.

Forbes recently published a list of the world's 100 most innovative companies. The measure they use is the innovation premium markets pay for their shares (in a nutshell: the difference between what the company should be worth based on cash flow projection and what it actually is worth for the markets, who assume some innovation to happen to increase earnings above projection) - as good a measure as any, as long as you stick to listed companies.
With salesforce.com the mother of Enterprise Software as a Service does not only lead the table, but does so by beating the runner up amazon.com (another cloud company, engaged in IaaS rather than SaaS) by a good distance. Traditional ERP companies follow only on rank 63 with SAP, which is still beating Oracle (not surprisingly) and even Microsoft.
It will be interesting to see
(a) whether other original SaaS vendors will join the list. Workday will be an obvious candidate. They are not yet a listed company but with an IPO planned next year they should be expected to take a good position. On the other hand, established listed SaaS companies like Concur haven't made the list. Maybe their recent acquisition of Tripit will give them a boost...
(b) how well the markets' assessment turns out to be in a few years' time.

Whether Enterprise SaaS is going to rule the world any time soon, we at iProCon dare not to predict. However, we are sure it will have a significant part of the market and many organisation will benefit form Software as a Service in various processes. That's why we make it our mission to help clients
- to decide about when and where to use SaaS
- develop their bespoke architecture including on-premise and SaaS solutions
- manage implementation and the the considerable IT and business change coming with SaaS

Many clients are currently asking for more information about Software as a Service to remove some fog and get a better view of what’s going on in the cloud. We therefore decided to run a new series of blog articles providing an overview on SaaS solutions as well as tips for managing integration and change around SaaS implementations. The articles will be in no particular order and we are starting with Workday HCM today, only because our team has come across it a lot in projects and discussions recently, so it sat on my mind, when I started writing. So check out our Workday HCM article here.

Check this announcement to learn about Cranfield School of Management's Business Technology Conference and iProCon's involvement on topics of Cloud Computing and contracting opportunities in IT

When hearing "SaaS", most people think "higher standardisation", and "out of the box solution". Within the constraints of whatever configuration the SaaS solution allows, this is usually right. Multi tenancy usually enforces a common code base and doesn't allow custom development, while making upgrades faster and less painful, and quite often also making the configuration, as far as allowed, more straightforward than in traditional single tenancy ERP solutions.

However, the demarcation line between SaaS and "traditional" vendors is blurring. SAP, Oracle, and others are rushing onto the bandwagon to get their own SaaS solutions out, proving the success of the concept. However, looking closely at what's on offer in HR/HCM, using SAP as an example, you find that your first port of call is not the omnipresent vendor from Walldorf, Germany, but some of their more innovative (or just bolder) partners. SAP HCM SaaS comes packaged as "exalerate" (from Exaserv), "tHRive" (offered by ROC), "euHReka" (by NorthgateArinso),...

They all have in common that they use SAP HCM as a foundation but add their own elements, most notably web based and mobile user interfaces. It is difficult to see how purely SaaS the end product really is and many argue that the core product, as not designed to be SaaS, will never be a perfect SaaS solution. But that's not the question we want to ask here.
What we find interesting is: how will SAP HCM - and other solutions in a similar situation - develop as SaaS? Will it vanish as an anonymous engine hidden behind the brands and UIs of powerful partners, with marketing execs in Walldorf taking a leaf out of Intel's book and try to get at least a "SAP inside" sticker onto those products?

Will SAP prevail as the driver of the solution, but clients looking for SaaS need to choose between various slightly different packages adding nothing more, but confusion? Or will we get to a point, where each reseller adapts their user interface, pre-configuration, add-on developments, and service models to a certain segment of clients, e.g. an industry or company size? With this thought, there is actually a glimpse of hope that the current confusion will eventually lead to added value for clients, as they will find real industry solutions - not just modules covering a tiny part of the enterprise or half-heartedly pre-configured templates suffering from too small a customer base. Products with market shares as large as Oracle's or SAP's can definitely cope with some segmentation, particularly when the core product stays the same and industry based SaaS solutions are offered on top - in co-existance with the pure traditional model for those, who still prefer to be 100% in control and change their system wherever they want to.

Of course, there's always the option that SAP themselves will start late, but thoroughly, and overtake the partner solutions offering a better SaaS of their own and making the multitude of current variations obsolete. This has happened before with other add-ons and service models.

So, there are a few scenarios where SaaS based partner solutions could drive traditional ERP vendors to - what are you expecting?
 

A high tech client aimed at making their T&E processes more efficient and get controls and analytics in place.
The project comprised a new travel policy, a new global travel agency, online travel booking and online expense reporting with approval workflows, rollout of credit cards to 50% of the workforce, an outsourced audit service, and tighter controls on providers of travel and accommodation.
The project was successfully delivered based on SaaS products within 3 months, followed by a period of optimisation in interfaces and analytics.
Read full T&E case study

Note that Steven comes close to setting "cloud" and "SaaS" equal in the first paragraph (he actually writes "cloud applications", which might be fine, but given the confusion of terminology in that field, we want to point it out anyway). Actually, SaaS is just a part of "The Cloud", which comprises other IT services like infrastructure (IaaS) or platforms (PaaS).