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SaaS Solutions: Everyone is talking about it. For CConsulting, it's our vision for the future.

Adriano Prefumo, Senior Partner, C Consulting International

Cloud solutions and SaaS (Software as a Service) have been talked about for 20 years or more, but in recent years the market’s demand for these services has become increasingly more important and sought after.

For this reason, it is easy to see that even for niche markets such as Reinsurance, SaaS will play a leading role in the large number of commercial contracts and agreements in 2021.
In the beginning of the new millennium, one of the first major companies to begin venturing on this innovative path was Salesforce.com, cited by almost all "gurus" in the field as a virtuous example in this field.

In fact, even then, Salesforce (founded in 1999) allowed customers to use their CRM in the Cloud and only charged for the amount of service used.

In reality, upon closer inspection, that was a clever and sophisticated evolution of the old concept of Outsourcing which had already been in vogue since the early 1980’s simply by delegating only Hardware, HW + Software, certain applications only, etc.… at various levels to other IT functions.

In the past decade, this concept has evolved even further into ASP (Application Service Provider) meaning that now there are Providers who can allow for the use of a single application as well as providing services needed for remote technological management.

In the early years of experimenting with Cloud, SaaS was identified primarily as a Pay-Per-Use model (PPU): This meant that the user only paid for “actual” use … which could amount to just a few euros depending on the time spent using the service.

Of course, the purpose of all these methods was to limit unnecessary costs for the end user. Even in the face of some obvious problems to be solved, which ranged from the need to agree on the necessary service levels (even complex SLA agreements) to the guarantee of privacy and security of their data by the supplier and so on, all of this has now been solved in part by the presence of large cloud providers. These providers reduce the objective risk of tremendous surprises; however, the complex nature of Agreements entered into for this type of service obviously does increase when compared to the traditional transfer of permanent license usage of a software system.

So, when it comes down to the user who has to choose, it is crucial to understand that services provided in the Cloud are framed in accounting terms as a current operating cost (OPEX), while the purchase of a license leads to capitalization subject to amortization.

The concept of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), or the total cost of using the solution depending on the type of offer and sufficient period is also important when making an evaluation. Generally, a Cloud / SaaS solution, depending on its actual contents, should have a lower TCO than a permanent license purchase and its related maintenance. But of course, this may not always be the case….

C Consulting is totally dedicated to the Reinsurance management market and has fully understood and actively responded to the development and needs summarized above, which have seen an exponential growth in the last two years (also thanks to the push towards virtualization during the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic).

Precisely for the need to cope in a market where there is an ever-increasing demand for digitalization and virtualization of services, the XLayers system has been totally rewritten to be, among other things, fully offered in the Cloud and also in SaaS mode in recent years. The system has maintained and even expanded on its richness and ease of use to ensure the success it has enjoyed in almost 20 years of being in business.

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