Cloud Services Pioneer ADP Continues to Grow Service Offerings

If you’ve worked for a major corporation in the United States in the past 20 years, there’s a good chance you’ve received a paycheck with three little letters on it: ADP. Those letters represent not only a company that handles payroll services for one in six American workers, they also represent one of the earliest and most successful cloud companies around.

When we ask our clients what they know or think about Fort Collins cloud services, Amazon Web Services is what most often comes to mind. Yet ADP has quietly been growing its customer and service offering base, and pulling clients into the cloud since the early 00’s.

How Big is ADP?

When you say “cloud services” to many IT folks, they’re immediately going to start thinking about HP or IBM’s newest cloud solutions, or of course Amazon Cloud services. What these people don’t realize is that their company may already be using ADP.

Here are some quick facts about what ADP does and their size:

• In 2011, ADP had $10 billion in sales. To put that in perspective, Amazon Web Services is estimated to have done just under $1.5 billion in 2012.
• ADP processes around $1.2 trillion in payroll payments for American workers, and the vast majority of the work is done in the cloud.
• ADP’s solutions are supported primarily by payroll services, which make up half of its revenue. The other half comes from managing other services for business, such as HR, benefits, taxes and time/attendance management.
• Clients range from large global conglomerates to small brick-and-mortar, mom-and-pop shops. They support Sodexho and Alcoa, but also Jenny’s Bakery and maybe your local Ace hardware store.

ADP is pervasive, and the largest provider of cloud-based services.

From service bureau to cloud provider

While the idea of cloud computing is new to many folks, the benefits it provides aren’t new. ADP built its business as a “service bureau” – offering to do things for businesses that they couldn’t do as efficiently on their own. In the early days, businesses submitted timesheet information either manually or via dial-up modem, and all the data was processed by a mainframe, followed by check printing and mailing.

Early in the 2000s, ADP began moving away from a traditional software model for its payroll processing, and moving clients toward Internet-based interfaces. This was a natural progression, and made signing up and on-site setup quick and easy.

Unifying ADP

ADP is confident that its cloud solutions are robust enough to push the company forward at the same pace. They’re “Vantage” project is designed to unify a number of cloud-based services under one single service, including:

• Payroll
• Talent management
• Recruiting
• Benefits
• Other various services needed on a daily basis by businesses from small to large

The advantage to businesses will be obvious and immediate: by using a single vendor with a single service stack, data can be shared between applications and with much less in the way of redundancy.

As your Fort Collins Cloud Services experts, we’re excited to see what’s in store for ADP, as well as help identify what kinds of other businesses we can meet with other cloud products.