Announcing the move, TechnologyOne Executive Chairman, Adrian Di Marco, said the move to the cloud  had provided the company with a “simpler, faster and more flexible model,” and meant it no longer had to deal with databases, technology and complexity. “We’re left to focus on our own business,” Di Marco said.

According to Di Marco, TechnologyOne’s move to the cloud started in 2011 as part of the company’s strategy to rebuild its entire business to embrace the cloud, enabling it to develop enterprise software ‘in the cloud for the cloud’, so its customers could enjoy all the benefits such as reduced operating costs.

Di Marco said the company had to “complete its own journey,” and gain first-hand experience of all the hurdles it was to encounter before it could “accompany customers on theirs.”

He said the company also wanted to free itself up from back-office functions so it could focus on its core business of writing and selling software, and lead by example by moving all its systems to the cloud, “learn some valuable lessons and use them when transitioning customers to the cloud.”

In order to ensure all new systems chosen would be the best for their particular purpose, Di Marco said that TechnologyOne also decided to devolve responsibility for IT to each department, with all those departments responsible for selecting and holding accountable their own vendors to meet their specific business needs.

“As an organisation of this size we have many diverse requirements, for example, the sheer scale of the infrastructure that supports R&D was a major consideration,” Mr Di Marco said.

Di Marco said Brisbane’s 2011 floods had served as a great motivator for moving to the cloud, as the company had to evacuate its $13 million headquarters, and while the majority of systems stayed available to staff, the 300 strong research and development (R&D) team was brought to a standstill.

“As a company that invests more than $30 million a year in R&D, this team is the core of our business and we simply cannot have them offline.

“The biggest lesson we took away from this was that if your data is in the cloud and not onsite, your people can work from anywhere, on any device, at any time. It’s a more flexible model of computing, with its own built in disaster recovery.”

Di Marco says that after TechnologyOne made the decision to take its business to the cloud, it discovered significant savings of between 20 to 30 per cent per annum just by switching its email provider to Gmail.

“We anticipate further IT savings of 20 to 30 per cent in each of the services that we move to the Cloud.

“The move away from the traditional operating environment has also had a positive impact on TechnologyOne’s culture in terms of greater collaboration, sharing, mobility and flexibility, benefits which are all inherent in a cloud based offering.

“Now we have successfully navigated the complexities of cloud migration, we are very confident we can save our customers a lot of that pain if and when they choose to move,” Di Marco concluded.