Prime minister David Cameron called attention to UK start-ups at the Conservative party conference yesterday, saying the rate at which new businesses were created last year was the fastest it had been in any other year. The Financial Times today reported on government stats showing that 455,000 businesses were registered at Companies House in 2010/11, compared to 400,000 the previous year and that the UK now has 2.61m registered businesses (4.5m including non-registered businesses), of which 99.5% are SME’s (sub 250 employees/sub £25m revenue).
There are plenty of upsides to this scenario for UK SITS suppliers, most obviously the scale of the opportunity. The tier one players know this and have been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to prise open the SME market for years now. The SaaS model is lifting the lid, enabling SME’s to consider types of solutions that were not accessible before. It also provides an entry point into the market for SITS start-ups. As our work with Little British Battlers shows (see the HotViews archive here), many of them are using SaaS as the backbone for their businesses. It’s a win-win situation.
Against that background, an update from HR and payroll specialist Moorepay, the NorthgateArinso subsidiary focused on the SMB market, was timely. Six months ago it launched an integrated SaaS-based HR/payroll solution with a backing of advice lines, aimed at businesses in the 50 to 80 employee range (see Moorepay adds a new dimension to the SaaS model). We caught up with MD Ann Fitzpatrick to see how things have been going and the answer is - very well. Enquiries are flooding in and the company has signed up 300 new clients so far, against a target of 250. All are taking the HR module, a healthy 37% are also taking the optional payroll module. What that shows is that there is demand for SaaS HR and payroll, that businesses are not just going with entry level options (they are willing to put more, and more complex parts of their business in the cloud), and that SMB’s are hungry for solutions. With the Advanced version of its offering due in Q1 2013, and a bank of several thousand customers on Moorepay’s existing solutions which it hopes to migrate over, the outlook is promising.