“It’s a very different IBM,” observed Pamela Webb, the chief administrative officer of SafeGuard World International, in an interview on theCUBE at her company’s recently concluded Pulse summit. Over the last two years, Big Blue has transformed itself into a force to be reckoned with in the burgeoning cloud market through an aggressive growth strategy focused on organic innovation and acquisitions.

The vendor’s latest buy, a Boston-based database hosting provider called Cloudant, was announced during the event alongside a slew of new services that Webb sees as part of a broader push to remove traditional barriers to adoption in the enterprise. IBM is trying to help clients define their cloud strategies, as she puts it, and its efforts have not gone unnoticed by SafeGuard, which is coming under increasing pressure to differentiate as rivals harness new technologies to deliver more customer value faster.

“Pressure is speed. That’s the biggest challenge for us, getting that competitive advantage from a speed perspective. The competition is going fast, the different types of SaaS solutions are really helping competitors enter markets very quickly,” Webb says. SafeGuard is not allowing itself to fall behind, however.

“We happen to be a SaaS-based company ourselves and that’s really what we’re trying to provide for our clients as well: The ability to scale very quickly [and] get to a predictable cost model, which is a huge factor for a lot of companies,” she details. To deliver this vision, the firm is actively fostering collaboration between IT and lines of business through a “technology advancement” program that also focuses on driving internal adoption of solutions that can prove beneficial to the bottom line. One offering that has proven particularly valuable in this regard is IBM’s SmartCloud Engage suite, which according to Webb not only enhanced employee productivity but also helped open up new communications channels with customers as well, increasing transparency.

The proliferation of cloud computing has put wind behind the social enterprise model, but implementing it at an organizational level is still a big challenge. “It’s a change management issue,” Webb explains. “There is one way individuals will function in their personal lives, but work is a little bit different, so we’re really working on changing that paradigm within our own organization.” Worker engagement and collaboration have always been top priorities for SafeGuard, which provides payroll outsourcing services to multinational companies with thousands of employees scattered across the globe.

Managing human resources in geographically distributed organizations presents major operational challenges, Webb says, notably the need to meet country-specific compliance requirements while keeping track of employer costs, which vary in each region based on the specific regulatory regime in place. “Most of the clients that come to us may have a thousand employees in one country but they have a lot of longtails: they’ll have five employees in country X, five employees in country Y. The global infrastructure needed to fund those employees is very expensive,” she says.

Historically, companies would build a unified HR system to handle all payroll administration, but the complexity and high cost of maintaining these kinds of deployments make them impractical. Webb says that her firm offers a more viable alternative in the form of an “aggregator model” that leverages integrations with popular solutions such as Workday to automate large parts of the process while lowering related expenses. As chief administrative officer, she’s responsible for project management and client service delivery as well as support, which together constitute the core of the SafeGuard proposition. She also plays a key role in developing business cases, a task many companies increasingly struggle with as the pace of change continues to accelerate. Catching up requires bridging the gap between technology and business, an endeavor that starts with the senior leadership team.

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