hSenid: HR SaaS and outsourcing in tandem

I've argued before that having good quality HR systems and processes are going to become an increasingly important asset that companies in the emerging Asian markets wield, in an effort to build and sustain differentiation. While the global HR systems players, such as PeopleSoft and SAP are well known, there is very different structure to each regional and national market. As such I am interested when I hear of smaller HR players in different countries.

Late last week I picked news in the Sri Lanka Daily Mirror about a Sri Lankan founded company called hSenid. They are a software provider as well an outsourcing services provider. One of the things that is especially interesting about them is that their HR platform is delivered through a Software-as-a-service (SaaS). This increases the applicability of their solution to the SMB market that is important in the countries that they are targeting, namely: India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. The fact that the outsourcing service is equally based on the SaaS platform is important for the uptake of outsourcing in the local markets. It means that there is a much lower on-boarding cost to outsourcing contracts, compared to traditional outsourcing contracts where there can be large software and associated implementation costs - even though these may be financed to give an annuity basis across the entire contract. The SaaS basis of the platform leads to lower implementation costs and so to lower outsourcing initiation barriers.

Local players, such as hSenid, have the potential to dominate local and regional markets - especially in the SMB sub-segment. Fundamentally this shows that HR markets are somewhat different to their CRM counter-parts, where international players such as Salesforce.com have been able to build market share. Of course, there are international players like SuccessFactors and other HR niche specialist firms, but the local firms are still able to take substantial market share. In the case of Sri Lanka hSenid claim market share approaching 70%. This local hero trend is likely to continue in the HR systems market for some time to come.