ONYX is hoping to transfer the trend of renting products and services rather than buying them into the software industry by linking up with German software giant SAP.

The Teesside-based IT solutions firm has been looking at the potential of making such products available on a per-use basis, and says SAP is just the first of a number of deals which will make these products more efficient for businesses. SAP operates in around 120 countries, and is ranked as the world’s third largest independent software manufacturer.

Onyx CEO Neil Stephenson said: “More people are wanting to buy IT on a per-user basis now. Rather than own it, they just want to rent it. There’s a market shift going on here. More companies are wanting these products to be rented out of a data centre off-premises. We own five data centres ourselves in the UK, so that’s a major differentiator.

“We’re going to be striking deals with other best-of-breed software providers. This is just the first one.”

The SAP deal will allow Onyx to be the first in the UK to provide SAP Business One as software-as-a-service, and it will adapt the software to client specifications as well as host the system. Business One allows the company to track a business minute-to-minute in areas such as sales, distribution and financials for a fixed monthly fee.

SAP’s director of channel Rich Phillips said: “Geared to organisations with limited IT resources, SAP Business One is an integrated solution that can help small businesses get the synergy they need across different business functions. The software is available as a hosted package enabling smaller companies to run the solution on a laptop instead of a server.”

The principle of using services stored off-premises has proved popular in the cases of email such as Google Mail, and the music streaming service Spotify.

Stephenson said: “It’s something we’ve been looking at for a little while and the technology is now at a stage that it works efficiently. People are already renting software and applications. It’s a change in terms of the market we’re operating in, which has traditionally been dominated by people who invest in technology to put in their centres. The change is partly economic, partly due to the increased flexibility of business, and partly to do with improvements in connectivity.

“If you’re a business of a reasonable size, you’ll find renting more efficient than buying. We think we can deliver this right across the UK, and we think it can provide growth, new jobs and new customers and a new way of doing things.”