Most readers will be aware that I live on a small(ish) lump of rock in the South Pacific. This remoteness from all things Valley-ish (and this remoteness, it must be said, from all things) gives me a somewhat one-eyed perspective. I’m always careful to not over push the New Zealand thing – my personal blog has a much more NZ-centric thrust to it.
Given the fairly depressing news of late coming from global economies, it’s nice to share some positive stories, no matter how small they might seem. As the Chairman of a board I set on is in the habit of saying – “macro economic trends are merely an aggregate of what is happening within individual businesses. So I thought I’d share some positive stories, the fact that these stories come from my back yard is even better.
A few things of note that have come across my desk in the last few days;
Training platform company Litmos (Diversity review here) has had some wins saving customers some money in terms of MS exchange licences. The bulk of the savings have come from moving a number of employees from full email access onto the in-built messaging on the Litmos platform. The Litmos offering is a nice point-to-point training management solution that provides for both training course creation and training course delivery. It’s a reminder that in these times businesses are looking to cut unnecessary costs – the ability to prove hard-ROI immediately following implementation is a real bonus for SaaS businesses.
Another local vendor Enfinit has a nice SaaS timesheet-management offering called TimeFiler that has lately been rolled out to a local hospital. The solution has saved 16.5 minutes per employee in timesheet filing or around 50 hours across the company per fortnightly payroll run. Again small numbers at a micro level – but aggregate lots of gains at the micro level and you start to see some real moves on the macro level.
Finally website optimisation company Aptimize (CloudAve review here) is running a pilot program on a couple of large websites both serving million plus page views per day domestically and internationally. At the same time they’re launching their product into the all-important US market. Apparently Aptimize is also close to signing licensing and distributorship deals with a number of Fortune 500 companies. They’ve told me some exciting stuff which, sadly, I’m not able to divulge yet – but it’s all good stuff that validates their product and shows the potential it has on the global stage. Aptimize has a page where you can generate a report to see the gains your own site would make by using their tool – check it out.
That’s the end of the CloudAve good news for today – hopefully more will be coming soon!
Thanks for the mention Ben!
It’s worth adding that since we now offer integrated eCommerce features, new companies are coming on board to sell training courses out to a third party to create an additional revenue stream by monetizing their IP.