A Smart Idea

EmployWise is one of the largest cloud based SaaS ISVs in India and is seen as a pioneer in the HR SaaS segment. Its HR solutions cover the entire life-cycle of an employee from recruitment to retirement and everything in between.

The SaaS HR provider has customers from varied industry verticals and has an employee base that ranges from 10s to 1,000s. Thus highly fluctuating scalability requirements is always a possibility for the service provider.

Its offering - the EmployWise solution - is a zero capex one that automates HR tasks, is versatile, configurable, and a multi-tenant one.

Before Moving To Smart Cloud

EmployWise was always a SaaS-based solution, delivered off the internet. Before moving to IBM, the HR service provider was delivering services off dedicated servers hosted in its own data center. Sumeet Kapur, founder & CEO, EmployWise, says, "We had our own set of servers co-located in a data center in Mumbai for several years before moving to cloud."

As it is a multi-tenant solution, all customers are hosted on the same application and use the same infrastructure. So ensuring that quality of service remains unaffected was a major concern.

The Challenge

Scalability was the most critical factor for EmployWise. Being a rapid deployment model, it required stronger and faster service delivery capabilities that are able to support new user loads, allowing scaling up and down as and when required. In a co-located model, it would take very long to install fresh capacity.

Planning for capacity ahead of time was a big challenge and being a capex model, investments had to be made for something that is to be used much later, say six months down the line. Capacity redundancy was hence a big issue.

Reliability was another key factor. Working with co-located servers meant that EmployWise was responsible for the hardware. According to Kapur, if in case the servers go down, then the responsibility to replace and bring it back was entirely on the SaaS provider and this in his own words could be a nightmare.

What EmployWise needed was a solution that could take care of such exigencies with greater speed. Realization struck well in time that its competency is in offering the services that it offers and not in upgrading and managing infrastructure. The objective was to move to a higher level where they need not worry about these issues and focus on what they do best.

The IBM Solution

What EmployWise wanted was scalability and reliability. IBM offered the solution in the form of SmartCloud.

IBMs SmartCloud is a flexible cloud-based infrastructure solution that offered EmployWise the desired scalability to upgrade and cut down as per changing needs. Apart from the cost advantage, SmartCloud offers a whole lot of benefits like manageability and elasticity.

According to G Dharanibalan, vice president, offerings management & development, global technology services, IBM, "SmartCloud is a very lucrative model for SaaS providers, because it offers them the desired flexibility, especially in situations where they need to scale up capacity by the end of the month and cut down."

Although its not a tailor-made solution but SmartCloud offers a lot of automation and self-service options. Its available in 9-10 different flavors of virtual systems.

Dharanibalan adds, "We notice that the uptake of these standardized service catalogs are fairly well and are industry aligned."

According to IBM the strength of SmartCloud is in being an enterprise class solution. The global technology company, which has operations in more than 170 countries, is very sensitive about fundamental elements like data privacy and security. The company is very mindful of the users and restricts its SmartCloud service to enterprises only.

"Using the IBM SmartCloud enterprise pay-as-you-go IaaS model, EmployWise will be able to develop and test their applications much faster via automation and rapid provisioning to create the required competitive edge," Dharanibalan sums up.

The Results

• For EmployWise: Its been around six months that EmployWise is on Smartcloud. According to the SaaS service provider, even within this short timeline, it has noticed and experienced a different level of scalability, significantly better than what it used to be. Few upgrades have already happened, both upscale and downsize. Seamless addition of customers no longer seems to be difficult.