TimeLog and the SaaS Ecosystem
Summer is coming to an end, and the finance crisis hangs like a thin haze in the morning air. Like most of the world’s businesses, TimeLog has also spent the last few years consolidating and strengthening the organization, our products, and our market position, so that we will be ready to jump on the growth train and grab our share of the upcoming year’s expected strong growth in web-based business solutions on a rental basis, known as SaaS solutions.
A key step in this development has been the launch of an ambitious strategy to bring TimeLog's three hundred and fifty customers and nine thousand daily users closer to TimeLog's product development.
An analysis shows that our customers have three primary requirements for a time tracking system:
1. It must contain simple, user-friendly time tracking
2. There must be flexible, user-defined reporting
3. There must be integration to their own financial system
Secondarily, special consultancy firms value the more advanced, process-supporting functions, such as an effective and transparent management of project budgets, a built-in project management and delivery system, resource management, invoicing, and integrated sales analysis.
A request for specialised SaaS products
The analysis substantiates a known challenge for all IT-product businesses; should you develop broadly, and cover more of the customers’ secondary needs so that the product covers 80% of all related processes, or should you develop in-depth, and cover more aspects of the core area – time tracking? Few companies in the world are large enough to achieve both.
We chose to follow the development of the SaaS department internationally, especially in the U.S. There, the demand for SaaS business solutions, up to 2008, were primarily driven by smaller growth companies’ needs for a product that covered all processes, from sales to invoice. Consequently, development is now driven by the larger, mature companies, who want specialised SaaS products that are easily (and inexpensively) integratable, so that both client and user will have a cohesive, but specialised, solution. The trend is referred to by Gartner and others as “The SaaS Ecosystem”.
Is TimeLog taking part in development?
Very much so – we’ve actually already been underway for a year, and in the spring, we introduced TimeLog Tracker 2.0 and TimeLog Tracker for iPhone, which both enhance time tracking significantly. We're also now seamlessly integrating with the business data firm BiQ and the CRM system SalesForce. The upcoming year will bring a number of innovative integration solutions –September already marks the release of a solution for the integrated document management Microsoft Sharepoint, and later in the year, we plan to release the integration for the campaign management tool Campaign Monitor in addition to the finance systems Microsoft Dynamics C5 og e-conomic.
Development is underway, and if you have ideas or opinions about future integrations or functions, then we would really like to hear from you. Send us an email at info@timelog.com or, even better, start a post on the TimeLog User Group on LinkedIn, where both TimeLog’s employees and customers can participate in the discussion.
