There is no doubt that this has been a tough year for many of the 50 or so (yes there really are that many..!) front office recruitment software providers out there today..

We've already seen the demise of one or two (RSS Eclipse was most notable, they got 'phoneixed' and fire-sale'd for a few grand allegedly).. with such an oversubscribed market (most of whom are really small 'a couple of guys in a garden shed' operations), further consolidation is inevitable.

The trouble is that with the majority of those providers offering a traditional up-front investment, LAN based license solution.. the pain that many of those businesses are in (they gotta kill-what-they-eat each month to survive) is severe to say the least (in the last month alone, we've seen 3 of the better known providers lose their Sales Managers).. as they say, it ain't gonna be pretty and there are going to be more casualties... 

If you're worried about you current provider, you might want to get a credit check.. Experian have a good service for this).. likewise, if you are thinking of moving, do make sure that they are going to be around for the long term! (by all means check us out too ;-) you'll see we've got a good rating, strong balance sheet and no 'history'..)

Actually, the precarious position that some of the recruitment software providers are in is really only half of the story..

What makes it worse for the LAN guys (and their customers) is that long before shedding sales staff, the have been quitting investment in product development (2 years ago, finding good developers with experience in our industry was challenging.. in the last 6 months, I've seen CVs from developers ex many of our competitors), which means that even when things do improve, their customers are going to find themselves way behind the curve..

For the established SaaS providers like evolve though, life is a much better :-)

The thing is that although it takes a while to build a customer base up (we've been doing this since 2001), the benefit of a stable income stream, coupled with a diverse customer base (200+ customers in 40 sectors), for whom the monthly fee is a really small part of their overall op-ex has really come good.

So as they say..trading conditions might remain 'challenging', actually, but we are in great shape and having made significant investments last year to support future grown and with a strong balance sheet and cash in the bank, to be honest we are pretty happy right now.

In fact, although we'd planned for a quite year, it's been anything but..   Our strong position and commitment to our continuous development program has meant that there's been no let up in the investment we make in developing and supporting our product.

Behind the scenes, the dev team been working had for the past few months on evolve V5.. which is going to be huge news for our customers.

There's going to be an official announcement on it in the next few days, so for now I can't say too much... there are some great new things though, including new tools for search and selection, particular emphasis on recruitment though social networks and some awesome new features for the CV pool that are going to really help all those recruiters who have seen such a huge increase in the number of candidate CVs through to their inbox...

..there's also a new look and feel, lots of new modules and options, an upgrade to document managent and one really big new item that absolutely rocks .... you'll have to wait a few more days to find out what it is though ;-)