Presence of IT has harnessed the Cloud for its EC-Payroll product, which also forms a part of SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll solution.
EC-Payroll is designed to enterprises move their existing human capital applications to the Cloud without the costly and complex compliance and regulatory upgrades associated with payroll applications.
Presence of IT business transformation and strategy director, Shane Grobler, said the product is a response to the structural change in HR and payroll provision in the marketplace.
“Clients used to buy software but now they buy a platform,” he said.
“Instead of organisations buying software and implementing the product themselves, or getting a third party to help them implement, it takes them a long time to mature that process within the organisation.”
Grobler said the company’s client base had been telling them that the Cloud is “the right way to go.”
“For that reason, we have been planning to be a major player in that space when it comes to HR and payroll in Australia,” he said.
Currently Presence of IT’s clients are on-premise, and Grobeler said they are spending “a lot of effort and investment” to have their payroll in this arrangement, but the vendors and the whole marketplace is moving to the Cloud.
There is also a lot of investment and development being poured into the new technology in the Cloud.
In this type of environment, Grobler admits there is a certain amount of inevitability for clients that want the latest and greatest technology or want added functionality to move to the Cloud.
Cloud conversation
Between the next three to five years, Grobler predicts that all of Presence of IT’s clients will have some sort of Cloud offering in their organisation, mainly due to the nature of the industry itself and where it is headed.
“It is a huge shift in the marketplace, and in order to be a part of it, we have to make sure we are in the game in terms of looking for our clients as we move from on-premise to the Cloud,” he said.
After SAP acquired SuccessFactors six months ago, Grobler said it presented an opportunity for Presence of IT to talk about to the company about the Cloud.
“Since we are specialist in the HR and payroll field, we suggested bringing our smarts and innovation that we have put together over the years and apply that to SuccessFactors’ product offering that is being changed in the Cloud,” he said.
“We felt their current on-premise would not scale up to the Cloud.”
Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.
