*UKHotViewsExtra* OLM's brave new cloud-native world

It takes a brave CEO to decide, after nearly 30 years at the helm of an SME, to go back to the proverbial drawing board and invest to develop a brand-new, cloud-native application to replace their flagship legacy product. But that is exactly the decision that Peter O’Hara, CEO and founder of social care software provider OLM, made five years ago.  

“When we decided to build the system from the ground up with input from social workers, people called me crazy as it was a significant investment, but I knew it was the right thing to do,” O’Hara told us admitting that the challenge of creating something from the ground up was huge. He realised at the time that to have a successful future in the evolving UK social care market, OLM needed a cloud-native application that was built with an open systems platform approach.  

The period following O’Hara’s bold decision wasn’t an easy one for OLM, coinciding with challenging trading conditions in the local government market as austerity measures led to reduced spending and pricing pressure. The evidence suggests that the investment was worth it, however. 

Building a case management system from the ground up gave OLM the opportunity to look afresh at the care market ‘in the round’ and design a platform that enables a person-centred approach – supporting not just social care but health, education and not-for-profit services too. The result is ECLIPSE, a cloud-native platform benefiting from the public cloud, which was developed in the UK with input from some 500 social workers and launched by OLM earlier this year. Although competition in the UK social care software market remains strong, early indicators bode well for ECLIPSE’s success.  More…

Subscribers to TechMarketView’s in-depth research streams and UKHotViews Premium service can read our detailed article profiling OLM in UKHotViewsExtra today: OLM: A brave new cloud-native world.

Posted by Tola Sargeant at '17:52' - Tagged: localgovernment   software   socialcare   healthcare