...With ComTech Advisory

Cloud pioneer predicts growth will outstrip sector forecasts

Cloud CTRM vendor Aspect Enterprise Solutions has made a confident prediction that the current financial year will be its best yet - the seventh in succession - with growth of its CTRM revenues of between 20 and 30%.

Aspect, a pioneer 13 years ago with Web-based technology for the ETRM/CTRM space, is continuing to gain ground through customer wins - thanks in part to a ramped up presence in North America - while much of the rest of the sector is seeing growth only through acquisition.

The prediction comes during an exclusive video interview, which can be found on YouTube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r1P_m0rkPA, with sector analyst Gary Vasey of Commodity Technology Advisory (ComTech). Aspect CEO Steve Hughes tells how Aspect's Cloud-based CTRM is reducing the cost-base for mid-market traders, delivering a standard of resilience that equals or beats that of on-premises CTRM, and providing unparalleled flexibility.

Hughes contrasts the $500,000 three-year cost of an on-premises CTRM solution with Aspect's Cloud-based service costing $100,000 less over the same period. At the same time as delivering huge savings, he tells Vasey, Aspect in the Cloud continues to achieve a standard of reliability that matches or beats legacy architecture alternatives.

"The last time we had an outage that clients noticed was around six years ago, and it was down for a few hours while we moved over to our DR site. Has it been down since then? Yes. Did clients know? No. And that's because our ability to recover is as good as it could be and that's because we're specialists…. so even if you employ in-house [IT support] it's unlikely your technicians and capabilities will be up to the standard we have because that's our reputation at stake."

Massively quicker implementation is another advantage of the Cloud approach. Hughes tells Vasey that Aspect's typical installation timetable is four and six weeks from ink to go-live. "And that's not based on hope, but on project experience of between 40 and 50 projects."

Vasey invites Hughes to comment on the differences between solutions such as Aspect's that partition customer data within a single implementation, and those that host individual clients on separate servers. "All you've got [with a managed service] is somebody else managing the headache but you're not going to get the scaling. Our application is truly multi-tenanted…. one hotel with many rooms, and you can have as many rooms as you like."

Hughes goes on to debunk the myth that Cloud-based solutions offer everyone the same service. It's true, he tells Vasey, that every client gets the same benefits, but they also have individual control over a wide range of parameters including what functionality they have turned on, and how ‘their' solution integrates with other systems. Another major advantage is that every client gets the same regular upgrades at the same time, with no waiting. "When you ask for a new feature, you get it straight away - not in six months."