Thread: SaaS is increasing, what are your thoughts?

Software as a Service (SaaS) is fast becoming the standard delivery model for HR software. Business analysts suggest that spending on SaaS solutions could increase by as much as 500 per cent over the next four years.

Is outsourcing your HR software on a SaaS arrangement the best way forward? Has anyone had any disaster/ success stories they would like to share, as well as any lessons learnt?

Second post on the site (I'm becoming a regular).

I've had mixed experiences with SaaS. I worked with a huge supplier of CMS recruitment software, which integrated with none of our other four (four!) systems. But it was better than nothing and did speed up candidate management. All in all though very expensive and very hard to customise.

Later, I bought an off-the-shelf SaaS product which was an end-to-end HR management piece. It worked well and was as cheap as chips (in fact, it was cheaper than chips!), but when we came to launch an online employee portal (another of their own products) it started to fall apart. Eventually, we sorted it. But I guess you get what you pay for.

The only learning I took from it was that, it was cheap (so I'd do it again), but it needs to be project managed to death (presume nothing works, ever, and you might get out alive!)

I guess there are different options for SaaS, outsource to a provider, or buy/ rent a product license.

With SaaS you would assume that there would be some techincal support available to you to help get the most out of the system, but an off the shelf product may not always suit the pecularities that different organisations have.

I guess it will depend on the different organisations, and the complexities involved.

I have found that sometimes you have to change the way you do things to be able to use the software, rather than change the software to be able to do what you want it to do...