10 Things you need to know about PSOs

1. The global PSA software market will hit a staggering $7.63 billion by the year 2017, according to new research from Global Industry Analysts, Inc. The news is surprising, considering the hit this market took during the recent global economic dip, as those companies purchasing such products opted to hold back their purse in infrastructure-enhancing purchases.

2. The tide is turning on this front in a significant way. Indeed, PSA software suites are increasingly emerging as bona-fide recession-proofers for corporate IT department principals inside professional services organizations anxious not to suffer the same shortfalls again.

3. Professional Service Automation is enterprise software that’s particularly designed for companies engaged in the delivery of accounting, management consulting, engineering, and agency and PR services, among others. With it, companies enjoy increased productivity and efficiencies across their operations, along with a much-enhanced view of what’s actually going on within them.

4. Up until fairly recently, PSA was regarded in terms of its individual components only. But its usefulness increases manifold with recent developments that link the software’s various disparate modules in a way that reveals the full breadth of available integrated solutions.

5. Not surprisingly, the omnipresent Cloud hovers above this aspect of operational efficiency, too. As more and more companies adopt the off-site approach to their data-management efforts, the opportunity to bundle all of their corporate activities—from sales to service to finance—under a single umbrella is too appealing to pass by. It’s why a muscular movement is afoot to blend the worlds of CRM and PSA.

6. A recent study conducted by consulting firm Service Performance Insight demonstrates that Salesforce CRM users who shift their interests to the Cloud are rewarded for the choice with higher bid-to-win ratios, greater average revenues per project and deal pipelines that are vastly superior to those of their less forward-thinking counterparts

7. The Service Performance Insight research also shows that PSOs simply cannot realize all the powers of their CRM systems unless they’re well integrated with their PSAs.

8. An integrated CRM-PSA application offers users the ability to track the gamut of their business activity—from fingers-crossed leads through in-the-bag deals—on a single platform, with a single interface, employing a single data repository.

9. By amalgamating their CRM and PSA platforms into one, goes the news, professional services firms benefit from larger project backlogs, improved executive visibility, better success with winning bids, higher billable utilization, an enhanced percentage of billable employees, more revenue from new clients and a greater proportion of projects that are completed on time.

10. Just the same, another burst of research from the same organization, this exploring the challenges of Salesforce CRM customers in the professional services industry, reveals that precious few of them have taken the steps to see through such a profitable integration. The news, still in the pipeline, is clearly yet to be fully put into profitable play.

Are a new set of cloud standards starting to form?

So it is with the developing shape of cloud computing. Definition is starting to emerge in the skies with the establishment of a set of standards seeking to best facilitate its adoption. Will they eliminate the confusion that currently shrouds the stuff? It’s a subject that’s scored a whack of attention from folks anxious to corral usability within manageable parameters. We take a look at some of the organizations trying to set the tone for this game changer.

Cloud Standards Customer Council.

This end-user advocacy group claims ownership of more than 100 members. It exists to complement existing cloud standards efforts. It seeks the production of a core set of client-driven requirements that lower the barriers for widespread cloud adoption by prioritizing key interoperability issues, including cloud management, reference architecture and hybrid clouds. It also hopes, with its existence, to facilitate the exchange of real-world stories that might provide illumination and insight into the practical application of this complicated new beast. A “resource hub” on the council’s website offers case studies in which users might find a useful reflection of themselves. The site also provides a compilation of industry news stories on the cloud, and cloud-based webcasts and podcasts can be accessed here. Notable members: Citigroup, Deere & Co., Costco Wholesale, North Carolina State University.

Open Data Center Alliance.

This Intel-backed standards organization was formed last year. Principles claim the membership represents more than $100 billion in annual IT spending power. This organization is behind the recent development of eight discreet “usage models,” designed to help IT managers in negotiations with cloud providers through the provision of various standardized templates. Indeed, this independent IT consortium is dedicated to having these usage models in widespread application in order to best help newcomers comprehensively appreciate the expected delivery of identified customer requirements based on open, industry-standard and multivendor solutions. Notable members: BMW, Marriott International, Shell and Deutsche Bank.

Cloud Security Alliance.

This not-for-profit, member-driven organization is committed to promoting the best practices for security assurance provision within cloud computing. Led by a broad coalition of industry practitioners, corporations and associations, the alliance is also keen to provide education on this subject for new users struggling with its dimensions. Its site helpfully lists upcoming events, such as the Cloud Security Alliance Conference 2011 (in Orlando, November 16 and 17). A blog features entries with such titles as, “Pass the Buck: Who’s Responsible for Security in the Cloud?” and “Understanding Best-in-Class Cloud Security Measures and How to Evaluate Providers.” It also provides a highly useful forum for the dissemination of the latest news, research developments and educational opportunities. Notable members: Coca-Cola, eBay, Reed Elsevier.

So as we move into the new paradigm keep an eye out for these cloud players; who knows, they may set the standards your organization has to meet.

Predicting the effects of new technology can be a challenge

Although it’s still early days, from a long-range historical point of view, the cloud has actually hovered above our various computer-powered preoccupations for a good few years now. Adoption rates for this game-changer motor ever forward, with bugs being identified and addressed, and capabilities being increasingly celebrated.

But it’s worth noting that we remain far from an end point in our understanding of, and appreciation for, this paradigm-shifting newcomer to our daily lives. The Microsoft-produced white paper, The Economics of the Cloud (TK), offers some insight on how this new age might evolve, and urges its proponents to take the long view and see the underlying economics as having the biggest impact on long term take-up rates.

What are the Future Prospects for the Cloud?

It’s always instructive to refer back to other examples of revolutionary design to gain a sense of the way a new advancement might unfold. The world’s first automobiles were described as “horseless carriages,” and they were designed just as their equine-powered predecessors had been—complete with whip holders—in spite of the revised absence of such requirements. “Engineers initially failed to understand the new possibilities of the new paradigm,” the paper points out, “such as building for higher speeds, or greater safety.” Just as in the early days of the car business, it’s difficult to predict where this novelty will take us, but it’s critical not to be hemmed in by restrictions that no longer apply.

Technical complexities and adoption hurdles steal most of the ink these days in literature covering the cloud, as was highlighted in our previous blog entry Calming (Mis) Conceptions about the Cloud. The Microsoft white paper points out the detriment to users’ exploitation of the technology such misinformation creates. Historically, however, it’s been underlying economics that have in fact had a much stronger impact on the direction and speed of disruptions, as technological challenges are resolved or overcome through the rapid innovation to which we‘ve become accustomed.

The cloud allows core IT infrastructure to be brought into large data centres that take advantage of significant economies of scale in three areas: supply-side savings (amortizing costs across multiple servers), demand-side aggregation (reducing variability) and multi-tenancy efficiency (amortizing costs across multiple customers).

Making the Most for your Business – Cloud Flexibility

Capitalizing on these economic benefits is the trick. Just as engineers had to fundamentally rethink design in the early days of the car so too will developers have to rethink their approach to this new era of application design. The concepts of multi-tenancy and demand-side aggregation will represent a formidable challenge for developers and IT departments after all; whatever their level of sophistication. And if you screw up, you could find yourself enjoying only some of the savings on offer, or, even paying more for application development than you currently do.

Onwards and upwards, then. And leave the whip holder in the dust.

The appeal of unified communications (UC) has long been acknowledged. A growing business with far-flung staffers beavering in isolation has much to gain from this concept, which brings together disparate enterprise business communication applications and integrates them into a single interface.

Here, everything from voice calls to videoconferencing, instant messaging to e-mail, faxing to voicemail find productive lodging under a common roof. Enhanced team collaboration thrives with this approach, which unifies human resources efficiently, regardless of their various physical geographies.

And an installed UC platform also means customers are better served, thanks to a single-number system and precise routing functionality that directs incoming calls swiftly to their most appropriate destinations.

UC’s Earthbound Limitations Surpassed in the Cloud

It’s a clean, clever, efficient plan whose widespread adoption by businesses big and small makes perfect sense. But for all of its inherently marvelous characteristics, the UC concept is limited in its earthbound state.

Elevate it to the cloud, however, and discover just how useful this tool can be. Consider:

1. Improved ROI

UC marries the cloud in a ceremony that offers participants a range of cost, operational and performance benefits. This approach delivers every telephony feature customers desire — without the imperative of an associated capital investment in PBX infrastructure, to say nothing of deployment fees or ongoing management costs. Newly flush in both IT resources and cash, companies can more productively deploy their staff and dollars along business-building avenues.

2. Flexible Ease

UC that’s integrated in a cloud format relieves managers of the burden and expense of maintaining their own UC server. With cloud-based UC solutions, users enjoy increased flexibility (they only pay according to engaged users) and easy adoption (that requires no additional hardware considerations).

3. Supplier Support

That cloud-based communications are rapidly gaining traction is a reality helped along by massive buy-in from manufacturers and suppliers alike. All of the big guys offer cloud versions of their UC platforms these days, including Microsoft, Siemens and Cisco. Their efforts are well-supported by prescient telecomm providers who themselves have added UC to their service offerings.

4. Identifying Lost Time

Webtorial’s 2011 Sourcebook of Hosted and Cloud-Based VoIP and UC Services study reports that bringing UC to the cloud will cut capital costs. Further, it will divert IT support staff from babysitting phone calls to more productive business-growing pursuits. Indeed, it pegs an annual recovered time-value for a theoretical company with 50 “knowledge workers” or employees who rely substantially on telecommunications at $942,500.

It’s an impressive claim that’s based on an assumption that SMB knowledge workers spend an average of 50% of their time on such mundane stay-in-touch tasks as: trying to contact people, scheduling meetings and navigating a constant flow of uninvited communications.

5. Becoming Future Ready

Organizations who transfer their telecommunications functions to the cloud capably prepare themselves for a future transformation. Given that they’re untethered from restrictive physical technology, these free-agent firms are well positioned to benefit from whatever productivity-enhancing communications capabilities float up in the days to come.

In the very first minute after the earthquake, 106 people filed status updates with the word “earth” in them. In the first three minutes, that number jumped to over 700. Since then, updates with the word “Haiti” have been coming at the rate of 1,500 a minute, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation.

But not only are texting, Tweeting survivors alerting the world to their plight, many of us on the receiving end are responding with our keypads, too. Springing from text-giving inroads dug after the South Asian tsunami in 2004, the cellphone is rapidly becoming the most popular means of pledging financial help to charitable initiatives.

Texting Your Donation

The Mobile Giving Foundation, the company that pioneered the technology behind “text-to-give” campaigns, reported this week that Haitian donations are arriving at a rate of US$50,000 an hour.

On January 20, the Canadian Red Cross set up a text-messaging campaign that lets cellphone users donate $5 to the Haiti Earthquake Fund by texting “redcross” to 30333. After users respond to a confirmation message, a $5 charge is tacked on their phone bill.

In the U.S., the American Red Cross has raised more than US$22 million in cellphone-administered donations since the January 12 quake.
But there’s more in store for this modest instrument of interaction.

The phone is gaining new prominence as the unwitting central character in an unfolding drama that will ultimately send up an across-the-board revised definition for this critical instrument of modern life.

Unified Communications Infrastructure

It’s why, more than ever, managers need to be mindful of the communications infrastructure inside which they organize their companies, and with the corporate partners with whom they align themselves in pursuit of same.

But there are limitations to these sharp new methods of communication, especially when messages are too wordy or complex for such bite-sized dissemination. It’s why attaching voice integration to data-based devices is more important than ever.

Indeed, this concept of “unified communication” is gaining ground for its usefulness in corporate environments where workers increasingly recognize the value of the marriage between computer and phone, and its promise of speedy and reliable communication.

Devices that can accommodate the dual demands of voice and data, business and personal, media consumption and individual interaction, are the current darlings of the buzzing telecommunications world.

Managers considering a commitment to a new communications system in 2010 need to select one that addresses all of their requirements—old school and new age alike.