All SaaS-ed Up

companies to save on costs in these times of crisis but would also help them to streamline their operations and focus on their core competencies."

GETTING SaaSY

Morph Labs' Damarillo believes Philippine companies are beginning to understand the value of the software as a service model. "When we started talking about SaaS back in 2007, nobody seemed to truly grasp its meaning. Now, we see a lot more enterprises--small and large-- identifying with the on-demand approach."

Damarillo explains that SaaS is akin to the Filipino concept of "tingi" and as such, SaaS adoption in the country will continue to grow and eventually pervade in the everyday business landscape. Philippine businesses that shy away from investments will grab SaaS with both hands as they begin to realize its value over the traditional model, he says.

Meanwhile, HP sees the adoption of SaaS happening across all major verticals, saying that it is especially getting significant interest from security-conscious sectors like the public sector, along with verticals like telecommunication and financial service institutions.

On the other hand, one area that Salesforce.com is quite keen on has been the contact center industry. "We are very excited about the fact that 75% of customer service centers will use cloud computing applications and we firmly believe that the Philippines will not be far behind as the service cloud brings the next generation of customer service to companies of all sizes, without the expense and maintenance of traditional software," says the giant firm.

Customer service indeed seems to be a key focus of companies going into SaaS. One such SaaS adopter in the country is Columbian Autocar Corp., the official sales partner and parts distributor of Kia Motors in the country. Columbian Autocar Corp. has three main business divisions: sales, service, and parts.

"Our business is largely built around service, particularly after-sales service, and that's why we needed a system that would help us in providing customer satisfaction without of course having to spend too much," says Reynaldo Santos, national parts manager at Columbian Autocar Corp.

In 2002, the company deployed a traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) system across its three divisions, hoping to increase efficiency in its business processes. "Before, we used to do things manually and this demanded too much manpower and time, which then rendered our processes slow."