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Company: CyberShift
Started: 1996
Located: Parsippany, New Jersey
Geography: Global
Market: Workforce Management
Products: Workforce Management and Expense Management
Key Customers: Allianz, BASF, Hitachi and Sunoco
Website: CyberShift
Recent News:
CyberShift CEO Named as Finalist for Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award
I asked Robert Farina, CyberShift’s Chief Executive Officer a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2009.
Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
No, actually we started out in 1996 as a pure on-premise software company. About five years ago we decided to shift our model from a perpetual software company to a subscription software business. In fact, when we started the move we were about 10% recurring revenues and today we are our new sales is about 70% of total revenues, which is a major change.
CyberShift’s workforce and expense management solutions enable our clients to dramatically enhance their ability to proactively manage and control the two largest variable costs for most businesses: people and employee expenses. As an organization we are dedicated to providing in-depth and high quality services to our client to solve our clients’ workforce challenges and to continuously improve our own operations and processes to be an outstanding long-term business partner. The good news is that our solutions provide real ROI for our clients and SaaS just allows us to build on those advantages. In fact, more than 70% of all of our new sales are SaaS.
Why do your customers buy from CyberShift?
Our clients like Cybershift for many reasons including the fact that we are a long time industry leader, having been in business for 13 years. We currently have over 600 customers using our Workforce and Expense Management solutions. Where CyberShift really differentiates ourselves is our ability to manage complex client needs for companies like 3M, Convergys, BASF, Sunoco and CBS Entertainment. These large organizations have distributed workforces, with multiple languages and changing requirements
Cybershift offers a proven technology platform that can support companies with less than 100 employees to organizations with more than 250,000 employees. We also offer a flexible deployment options for our clients, which they find valuable. Our SaaS platform is robust and designed to support large, complex and global organizations. Our data center is SAS70 Type II certified and we have also passed CICA 5970 and PCI III certifications. Today we have employees in 27 countries accessing CyberShift solutions.
Because we have been in business a long time, it gives our clients confidence in the company and we have experienced solid growth rates in excess of 35% as well as strong adoption of our on-demand offerings. CyberShift also receives a lot of industry awards which also provides us with credibility for both our existing clients and companies who might be looking for Workforce Management solutions.
We also partner with firms that resell our products along side their offerings, that create a nice packaged solution for our joint clients. Ceridian offers our scheduling, time and attendance and expense management solutions to their clients. Mastercard partners with us to resell our travel and expense solutions. This allows our joint clients to purchase a complete solution from a single supplier.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
For our area of the SaaS market, we see a large opportunity to sell our solutions into the small and medium business segment. These firms were harder to reach and SaaS allows us to more cost-effectively deliver Time and Attendance and Expense Management solutions.
We also believe that channels like Ceridian and Mastercard are important and will continue to help firms like CyberShift sell our SaaS products more efficiently than doing it just through a direct sales approach.
Another trend is organizations outside of the US looking for Workforce Management solutions. There has been some fairly significant interest in our products in Europe and we are in fact doing a pilot for Nokia, which we are watching closely.
What is your outlook for 2009?
For many companies this year has been difficult and we have noticed a slow down at the beginning of the year but because our solutions have a real ROI, it hasn’t hit us as hard as the overall industry. There has been a lot more caution during the procurement process but we are still getting deals done. So far in 2009 we have sold a good number of deals but we have just seen clients taking smaller steps first, including a lot more pilots of our products.
Thank you to Bob Farina and Jeanne Achille for contributing to this profile.
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