With the economic downturn forcing companies to look more seriously at alternative ways to invest in IT infrastructure upgrades, SumTotal Systems Inc, a US-based provider of talent development solutions that has its global development in Hyderabad, is shifting its focus on providing software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based offerings globally.
“Our primary target is small and medium enterprises, especially in developing countries like India and China where SaaS will be a good model to adopt as it gives low cost of ownership and high return on investments. As organisations in these developing countries are less mature, it makes sense for them to buy subscription of these applications versus upfront payment towards software licenses, databases, hardware and have a dedicated team to manage the system,” Anupam Pahuja, managing director (India), SumTotal Systems, told Business Standard.
In 2009, SumTotal will continue to accelerate its SaaS business and win in learning, performance and talent development markets by offering best-of-breed solutions. The company currently has about 1,500 clients globally, of which 150 have already embraced the SaaS model. It estimates to double the number of customers and revenues using the SaaS-based model in the next 12 months, he added.
SumTotal Systems, created by the merger of Click2Learn and Docent in March 2004, at present has 760-odd workforce globally, of which about 325 work out of its Hyderabad campus. “In India, we have plans to move more strategic business units and the employee base is expected to grow more than 400 in the next one year,” Pahuja said.
According to him, about 80 per cent of the company’s sales come from North America, 15 per cent from EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and the rest from the Asia-Pacific region. “As the EMEA and APAC markets are growing faster than North America, we expect that our pie from EMEA and APAC would grow much bigger in the next few years,” he said.
Speaking on the latest trends in adopting solutions like SumTotal’s Talent Development Suite, Pahuja said more and more companies ranging from large enterprises to SMEs are looking at solutions that would help them plug gaps in skills and competencies with learning that leads to tangible results.
“Companies now want learning performance to be very closely aligned because they understand that one cannot have performance management without the learning that accompanies it. Companies want to provide all necessary resources to their employees so that they are able to minimise their own skill gaps and improve their own performance. Technological trends like preference towards SaaS and mobile learning also show up on companies’ wishlists,” he Pahuja added.
