Philippe Bloquet, can you introduce yourself and PeopleSpheres?
I am the founder and President of PeopleSpheres which was founded in 2015 and was called “MyHR Portal” at the time.
PeopleSpheres is a PaaS, Platform as a Service. We are the next generation of the IT world after SaaS (Software as a Service). One of our strengths is to exploit the richness of SaaS which, since its emergence, has seen the development of tens, even hundreds of thousands of tools, which today creates a real complexity for users and HR managers. PeopleSpheres is here as a facilitator allowing to interconnect these different tools via its platform.
Thus, our customers can create their own customized HR information system by assembling software, products,… and any other services coming from a large panel of editors of the SaaS world, who can be PeopleSpheres partners or not.
Why did you choose Iguana Solutions as your partner to manage your web infrastructure? How would you describe your daily collaboration with Iguana Solutions?
When we started MyHR Portal, I was running a consulting company and we incubated MyHR Portal within that company. We had few in-house technology skills and very few system skills. We took a look at the market, the more and less important players as well as the public cloud providers.
We found something in Iguana Solutions‘ offers that was not available from other more traditional partners. Namely, a service offering that encompasses the infrastructure provisioning, the infrastructure management and the DevOps services in order to allow PeopleSpheres to focus on its core business and to focus on the evolution of the services made available to its customers.
The solutions offered by Iguana Solutions allowed us to have a controlled budget in line with our needs while allowing us to grow without technical brakes related to the infrastructure. Since our inception at Iguana Solutions, our platform has moved from a shared architecture to a dedicated infrastructure, which we migrated to at the end of 2020, with complete transparency for our customers.
PeopleSpheres is enjoying strong growth and we have more and more customers, especially large accounts. It was only natural that we approached Iguana Solutions to broaden the scope of our partnership to include new structuring projects such as SecOps.
What challenges does Iguana Solutions help you address?
In general, we have strong growth challenges, this year we are between 250 and 300% growth and we should remain on the same trend in 2022 especially with our expansion in the United States.
Iguana Solutions is today a solid partner and essential to our growth by meeting one of our primary challenges which is the reliability of the infrastructure. They accomplish this by providing us the right services, and tools such as innovative monitoring solutions.
What are the next challenges for PeopleSpheres?
We completed our last fundraising in April 2021 and we are tackling the US market this year. We have already opened offices in New York with French and American resources.
We are beginning to sign our first U.S. customers and expect a more massive rollout starting in January 2022.
To stimulate our growth, we wish to recruit about forty new collaborators. It is a challenge to find the right technical and commercial profiles and those for certain more strategic positions in the organization.
In this context, we have renewed our confidence in Iguana Solutions as a strategic partner for this international development. Iguana Solutions is also present in the United States, which ensures that our local teams have daily support for our platform.
Today, more than 300 customers use our solution. We want to leverage PeopleSpheres’ central position in an ecosystem of partners and tools. Because we do data aggregation, we have a phenomenal ability to mine that data. We can be a force of advice either upstream for the integration of new customers (choice of tools for example: payroll system, annual interview…) but also downstream, via the exploitation of certain data, the realization of benchmarks… One of our challenges of tomorrow will be the integration of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in our products.