Processing more than $136 billion in annual transactions, and serving more than 9,000 companies and 200,000 users in the North American oil and gas industry, Transzap is an industry leader in e-payables, e-budgeting, e-revenue, and e-statement solutions. In 2010, Deloitte recognized Transzap as one of the 100 fastest growing companies in the U.S. In January 2011, Transzap achieved an SAS 70 Type II certification as a result of a successful audit of the integrity and security of its systems. This included an exhaustive assessment of Transzap’s controls in the area of operations and an evaluation of procedures critical to the processing of vast quantities of information, including the exchange of more than $100 billion in transaction detail.

“This accomplishment affirms our commitment to providing customers with the highest industry standards for systemwide data protection and reliability,” says Peter Flanagan, president and CTO  of Transzap. “Transzap will continue to provide important data safety assurances to our customers, particularly those who must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, so they know their information is being kept safe and secure.”

Above and beyond this, Transzap’s mission is to become and remain a best-in-class Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. To this end, Transzap continues to invest in internal systems and operations that capably support the financial needs of its extensive client base.

“Like many SaaS providers, we were aware of the impact of the recession and the fact IT budgets were getting slashed over the past few years,” says Flanagan. “The SaaS market slowed down, like everything else, to where people began to ask what would happen next.”

Since that time, IT budgets have been building back up, and Flanagan notes that more companies are beginning to look at SaaS options again.

In focusing the strategic direction for his company, Flanagan talks about three different modes of SaaS:

• Intra-corporate SaaS
• Supra SaaS
• Same old SaaS.

“If you look at what has been the traditional adoption cycle for SaaS, it has thrived within the four walls of a corporation as a kind of ‘intra-corporate SaaS’ because it enables a company to buy 500 or 1,000 seats it needs for a particular application without a corresponding investment in the infrastructure that supports it,” he says. “But as companies become more engaged with each other in business processes that are external to the organization, a need has emerged for ‘supra SaaS,’ which is capable of interconnecting different companies that do business with each other as partners.”

At the other end of the SaaS spectrum are SaaS operations that do little more than locate a physical server in their facility and take over the run schedule for an organization that no longer wants to do it internally. There’s little application enhancement and little expertise that accompanies the service.

“These operations, which I refer to as ‘same old SaaS,’ defined SaaS in the beginning for many companies, but it’s not what we deliver,” says Flanagan. “Our commitment is to a fully featured, fully supported, end-to-end suite of SaaS applications that can successfully connect companies in a secure environment and then do business.”

The Transzap Business Model