Professional Services in the Cloud

We had a great webinar with Mike Fauscette of IDC last week. The topic, of course, was professional services in the cloud. Mike discussed industry trends that are driving demand for services resource planning (SRP) solutions that go far beyond traditional professional services automation and we demonstrated how we’re making this vision a reality with our PS Enterprise solution. If you missed the webinar, you can watch a recording here.

We had over 300 people register and 120 attend our event. Thanks to all who attended and registered. We enjoyed the lively discussion and will follow-up over the next few days with a Q&A post addressing the questions we missed during the session.

As part of the webinar we conducted a few polls which reinforced two of our core beliefs about this market.

1) Professional services firms have been under-served by traditional software

We'd long suspected that many professional services firms were running their businesses off spreadsheets but even we were a bit surprised by this. It's clear from looking at this that traditional ERP and PPM software are ill-suited to the needs of professional services firms. Netsuite/Openair/Quickarrow has achieved decent traction with their SaaS PSA solutions but the vast majority of companies are still running their businesses on in-house solutions or less.

2) Services firms are finding that their custom apps/spreadsheets are increasingly brittle foundations on which to build their businesses

Given the number of companies running on spreadsheets or custom applications, this chart isn't too surprising. If a company is running on spreadsheets, scaling is a major challenge and manual processes take away from all important billable hours, leading to dissatisfaction. Similarly if companies are running custom applications, scaling requires new hardware investments, and changes to reflect new practice areas, rei, etc. all require coding, again leading to dissatisfaction.

2) Professional services firms are aggressively adopting cloud solutions

After the doom and gloom of the first two charts, it's good to see some hope on the horizon. Professional Services firms are ahead of the curve in terms of both adopting and piloting cloud applications and infrastructure. 98% of people who attended our webinar had at least some familiarity with cloud computing and over 70% are actively adopting it. We've long believed that professional services firms are a perfect fit for the cloud because of their people and IP-based businesses, distributed workforces and desire to focus on core competencies. This data affirms our belief.

Summary

Services are a large and growing part of the global economy, but have not been well supported by enterprise technology. The reality is that most firms, especially larger services firms, are
managing their operations using legacy and custom-built solutions, with
lots of painful spreadsheet workarounds. Building applications, custom or on spreadsheets, should not be core strategic differentiators for a services businesses. This is a distraction, at best, from focusing on developing people and delighting customers.

Solutions such as Appirio's PS Enterprise, that are built on extensible, scalable cloud platforms enable services teams to focus on what's most critical - getting the right people on the right projects for successful delivery to customers.