Innovative Computing Corp., a provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) for the trucking industry, says it is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the industry’s first fully integrated enterprise software available via the Internet.
Initially installed in 1999, Innovative says its online customer base has grown on average nearly 20 percent per year for each of the past five years. The Brentwood, Tenn.-based company says this steady increase followed an immediate growth spurt in the initial years of its SaaS offering, which at one point saw a 57 percent annual growth in SaaS customers; its SaaS offerings since have grown to manage and dispatch a combined total in excess of 82,000 loads each month. As an enterprise system, not only can carriers dispatch trucks, but they also can manage their accounting, maintenance and safety through one online system, according to Innovative.
The company says that through its SaaS offerings, IES Access and Access Plus, small and mid-sized customers are able to take advantage of an enterprise software system used by many of the most successful carriers in the industry without adding expenses in staff or hardware and without the related concerns, allowing carriers to focus on trucking, not systems management.
According to the company, its SaaS customers also rely on the IBM Power server and i operating system; as a result, Innovative’s SaaS customers have enjoyed 24/7 availability of their system with more than 99 percent uptime across the 10 years of the program’s use. As an online offering, even if a customer’s own office is closed, that customer still can manage their company from wherever they have Internet access, the company says.
When asked about the success of the SaaS model, Innovative President Ernie Betancourt points to the inherent ease of operations and cost savings found within IES Access and Access Plus that now are accessible to carriers ranging in size from 10 to more than 400 trucks per company. “We believed it in 1999 and continue to stand by the fact that SaaS is the way of the future for a large number of trucking companies,” Betancourt says. “With Innovative’s SaaS systems, small and mid-sized carriers are benefiting from the same enterprise-level cost savings, efficiency and security that larger carriers require, while significantly reducing their own hardware and administrative costs.”
Innovative says SaaS systems offer several key benefits; critical among these is the protection of a fully parallel system running duplicate software, data, connections and hardware at an offsite location. This redundancy means that should an emergency occur, Innovative customers know that their system — including its third-party tools such as mobile communications, fuel, EDI, mileage and imaging — will be ready for them on short notice; all that is required is an Internet connection for their company to be back online. In addition, Innovative says its SaaS-based customers also know that their hardware, security, interfaces and related updates are constantly managed for them.
Innovative also participates in the American Trucking Associations Carrier Savings Program (ATACS). The ATACS is considered one of the benefits of being a member of ATA and is designed specifically to help small and mid-sized carriers operate more efficiently by offering rebates and discounts from industry-leading vendors.
