Switching to T-Suite difficult decision for SMBs: Ovum

Peter Dinham
Friday, 03 April 2009 08:10

Your IT - Home IT

“The T-Suite Workplace Guardian service will assist SMBs to implement compliant employment processes, including template contracts, letters of offer and termination etc.

The SaaS offering taps into this angst, and offers the prospect of processes and templates that are automatically updated as legislation and workplace practices evolve in the future. Nice work.”

According to Hodgkinson, this kind of local value will be an essential sweetener for the more generic SaaS offerings such as email and CRM, and may well prove to be just the differentiator that T-Suite needs to attract the attention of SMBs.

However, in relation to data security and privacy issues, Hodgkinson sees possible problems down the track.

“Telstra has adopted a two-tiered stance to data security and privacy issues – data stored within Telstra’s infrastructure comes under the company’s usual policies. For data stored by ISVs, Telstra will take ‘responsible measures’ to require ISVs to implement appropriate policies and to ensure that they do the right thing.
 
“This is probably the best that can be done at the moment, but our sense is that this is a joker in the deck that could cause trouble, and will require careful watching as the SaaS offerings mature,” Hodgkinson cautions.

Commenting on the T-Suite offerings by Telstra and SaaS offerings from Google, Hodgkinson says that Telstra could be accused of being a bit slow off the gun with T-Suite compared to Google’s more cavalier approach to online beta.

“We see the SMB SaaS market as quite different to Google’s global consumer market – smaller and less forgiving of false starts and under-baked services,” Hodgkinson adds.