Business software

[ChrisFilter]

Yeah, but again, it's about packaging it.

 

[ChrisFilter]

As a traditional IT manager D) I don't like the idea of shoving all my eggs into one basket regardless of what redundancy is available.

For businesses with <100 users, hosting just makes sense. Low capital outlay, redundancy capabilities that would cost tens of thousands for the in-house equivalent, and far better dr and bcp functions.

 

[Wintermute]

Packaging what? Google Docs kicks arse, it really does, but it's about as useful as a real-life office tool as a speak-n-spell. It's got a long way to go. If all you're selling is packaging, then...

Also: what Kanda said. I run a small business. An IT one. If I've got to put my eggs in any basket I'll put them in MY basket, thankyou, not some third party. I've looked at a few hosted 'solutions' and not one comes close to providing the basic functionality we require to operate as a business. Their sole use is specifically off-site data backup. And I can do that with the tape drive we have in one of our servers that certainly cost a hell of a lot less than ten grand.

I'm intrigued by your position, though. Can you illustrate a business case where farming out business-critical data and infrastructure is less expensive and more effective (in terms of responsiveness and control) than keeping your data management in-house?

 

[Kanda]

For businesses with <100 users, hosting just makes sense. Low capital outlay, redundancy capabilities that would cost tens of thousands for the in-house equivalent, and far better dr and bcp functions.

Sorry Chris but redundancy that costs tens of thousands??? That's bollocks I'm afraid (I work in a company of <50 and have worked for Global companies with >5000)

I know you tow the Service provider line but come on....

 

[Crispy]

Openoffice, plus multiple USB hard drive backups = low cost and redundant, right? You're talking <£1000 there.

 

[Kanda]

Well our critical data replicates every half hour. Thats a bit of space in a data centre (2k/year) with a server, that we setup, we just replicate to that and should anybody not be able to get into the office... or the office goes boom... everyone has an ADSL line/laptop and we can trade or do Ops work from home or wherever they want to...

THAT did not cost tens of thousands of pounds. Why? Because we done it ourselves instead of outsource it

E2A: (We do have internal redundancy, still doesn't cost tens of thousands)

 

[ChrisFilter]

Sorry Chris but redundancy that costs tens of thousands??? That's bollocks I'm afraid (I work in a company of <50 and have worked for Global companies with >5000)

I know you tow the Service provider line but come on....

You and your workmate's salary, annually, comes to a lot more than £10k per annum doesn't it?

 

[Kanda]

You and your workmate's salary, annually, comes to a lot more than £10k per annum doesn't it?

Well yes, of course it does. But you need one IT person on the trading floor at all times. Workload wise, we don't, but that's just redundancy because you can't have one person doin the job cos of holidays/sickness etc.

Are you saying that is outsourcable cheaper? In such a reactive manner? We can't afford to have someone on the end of the phone, if a problem arose we'd stand to lose more than 10k/minute if someone wasn't *there and then*.

 

[ChrisFilter]

I'm intrigued by your position, though. Can you illustrate a business case where farming out business-critical data and infrastructure is less expensive and more effective (in terms of responsiveness and control) than keeping your data management in-house?

Yep, the business I (help) run is slowly moving towards a hosted solution. We always use what we recommend, because the second we start recommending untested solutions is the second we become just as shit as a lot of our competition.

We use hosted exchange @ £6.50 per mailbox per month - it's faster than our old Exchange box and required no intial outlay. That's all we pay - no replacing hardware or the like. Full AV and antispam included, as is daily backup and fully FSA compliant archiving.

We use our own flavour of Netsuite. Nearly all our critical data is stored there. Nothing onsite (well, we have a few offline clients in case our 3 different net connections go down (leased line, SDSL and Urban Wimax SDSL). This is our CRM, Part sales, warehouse management, ecommerce, accounts and support (for over 500 clients) management package.

We run hosted sharepoint 2007 for our file storage, CMS and HR management functions.

Now as we're an IT house, we still have plenty of inhouse servers. Hosting isn't a replacement for everything, but it does mean reduced costs and pretty much 0% downtime.

 

[untethered]

I'm intrigued by your position, though. Can you illustrate a business case where farming out business-critical data and infrastructure is less expensive and more effective (in terms of responsiveness and control) than keeping your data management in-house?

Google Apps costs $50 per user per year.

I wouldn't use the Docs and Spreadsheets bit in preference to a desktop application, but Gmail/Google Calendar is fine.

Do you think you can run an in-house mail/calendaring server for that price?

 

[ChrisFilter]

Well yes, of course it does. But you need one IT person on the trading floor at all times. Workload wise, we don't, but that's just redundancy because you can't have one person doin the job cos of holidays/sickness etc.

Are you saying that is outsourcable cheaper? In such a reactive manner? We can't afford to have someone on the end of the phone, if a problem arose we'd stand to lose more than 10k/minute if someone wasn't *there and then*.

Yeah, but your environment has special requirements of it's IT function, outsourcing and hosting wouldn't work for you.

I'm not saying that it works for everyone, but for a good 80% of our clients (20 - 200 user SMEs) hosting can save them money and hassle compared to the inhouse equivalents.

 

[ChrisFilter]

Well our critical data replicates every half hour. Thats a bit of space in a data centre (2k/year) with a server, that we setup, we just replicate to that and should anybody not be able to get into the office... or the office goes boom... everyone has an ADSL line/laptop and we can trade or do Ops work from home or wherever they want to...

THAT did not cost tens of thousands of pounds. Why? Because we done it ourselves instead of outsource it

E2A: (We do have internal redundancy, still doesn't cost tens of thousands)

Hold on, £2k a year, plus the cost of the server (£3k min, I assume?). In two years that's £7k. Plus the cost of management. Plus your internal redundancy, that looks like over £10k.

Anyway, regardless, what I meant was tens of hundreds for the equivalent level of redundancy:

Webmail access to email in the event of mass server/datacentre failure for 28 days. Full archiving. Back online within 2 hours with a maximum of 1 hour data loss. The ability to work from anywhere with a net connection.

For your standard SME this would cost a fortune, definitely tens of thousands.

 

[Dubber Dan]

Well that truely set the cat amongst the pigeons!!!

Lots of ideas and suggestions and some interesting looking links to follow up. Anyone got an idea of what Netsuite costs as I can't see it on their site, at least it's nowhere obvious. I guess that means it's gonna be serious money and out of the question anyway!

But to be honest I'm not sure Netsuite et al. are really what I'm looking for as I was kinda hoping for a solution that runs on my server (read beefy pc with dual external drives for redundant backups) in my home office.

The perfect solution would allow me to hold records of my clients, the services they have purchased and the recurring invoicing point for each service/client (multiple services with different invoicing dates possible for each client). The ability to have an email reminder sent out 60/30days before, then the invoice emailed out on the specific date, all automatically without my input.

 

[Wintermute]

Do you think you can run an in-house mail/calendaring server for that price?

Well, I reckon I could get pretty close if I really wanted to. But I'd say that a different way of looking at the question might be: would you hand your mail/calendaring requirements over to a solution that costs just $50?

We use hosted exchange @ £6.50 per mailbox per month - it's faster than our old Exchange box and required no intial outlay. That's all we pay - no replacing hardware or the like. Full AV and antispam included, as is daily backup and fully FSA compliant archiving.

Mmmm, so £780/year for 10 mailboxes. So yeah, I'd probably have to run our own Exchange server for about 4 years to make up the costs. And, as you point out, that doesn't include the cost of me actually running it, about which I have no idea. But neither does it include the benefits, which to my mind are considerable. If I want something fixed, it gets fixed. There and then. If I want to do something that our SLA doesn't cover, I change our SLA. I can do what I like, how I like, when I like. And I'm not reliant on anyone else for it. Maybe that's a less common requirement in SMEs than I thought, but for us it's fundamental. I simply cannot envisage putting IT infrastructure into the hands of third parties for reasons other than economy of scale and, for a small business whose USP is flexibility and control, that's pretty irrelevant.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Not on the email/hosting/ra ra I have more backups than you side, but a lot of companies I deal with these days (usually fairly small ones) seem to be using Basecamp for project management. Any thoughts on that? They seem to like it, but I've not been blown away with it as a user. Perhaps it takes more regular checking than I like to do.

 

[untethered]

Well, I reckon I could get pretty close if I really wanted to. But I'd say that a different way of looking at the question might be: would you hand your mail/calendaring requirements over to a solution that costs just $50?

I assume that Google's software, servers and technicians are considerably cheaper per user given that they have millions of them than a box sitting in your office and some chap on call when it all goes wrong.

How likely do you think Google are to lose all or part of your data, or have long periods of downtime?

You seem to have little idea about the requirements of SMEs with straightforward needs and not a single technically-minded person on the staff.

One organisation (~15 staff) I can think of pays more as a monthly retainer to their tech support company than they'd pay to have Google apps, and that's before you get into the costs of hardware, exceptional maintenance and increased downtime.

 

[ChrisFilter]

Well, I reckon I could get pretty close if I really wanted to. But I'd say that a different way of looking at the question might be: would you hand your mail/calendaring requirements over to a solution that costs just $50?

Gmail rarely goes down and GoogleApps mail is just Gmail with your own domain name, essentially. Yep, I'd trust it.

Mmmm, so £780/year for 10 mailboxes. So yeah, I'd probably have to run our own Exchange server for about 4 years to make up the costs. And, as you point out, that doesn't include the cost of me actually running it, about which I have no idea. But neither does it include the benefits, which to my mind are considerable. If I want something fixed, it gets fixed. There and then. If I want to do something that our SLA doesn't cover, I change our SLA. I can do what I like, how I like, when I like. And I'm not reliant on anyone else for it. Maybe that's a less common requirement in SMEs than I thought, but for us it's fundamental. I simply cannot envisage putting IT infrastructure into the hands of third parties for reasons other than economy of scale and, for a small business whose USP is flexibility and control, that's pretty irrelevant.

Most (in my experience, all) SMEs are perfectly happy with bog standard Exchange. It's not exactly a flexible app, it does what it does.

What would you need to do with your server that you don't think you could do with Hosted Exchange? You get a full control panel and a 10 minute "we're on it" SLA for critical issues.

We use it a) to practice what we preach (b) cut down internal maintenance and (c) to facilitate mobile working without a VPN.

 

[ChrisFilter]

Not on the email/hosting/ra ra I have more backups than you side, but a lot of companies I deal with these days (usually fairly small ones) seem to be using Basecamp for project management. Any thoughts on that? They seem to like it, but I've not been blown away with it as a user. Perhaps it takes more regular checking than I like to do.

Heard of it, not used it.

And the discussion isn't all 'ra ra ra'.

 

[untethered]

Heard of it, not used it.

I've used Basecamp.

It's pretty good (and I like hosted web apps) but the main benefits come when you invite your clients/partners to participate and log in to the system. In my experience, very often they don't want to learn something new.

Basecamp takes a communication approach to project management rather than a resource-scheduling one. The authors call it the anti-MS Project. If that's where you're at and your clients are happy to use it, great. If not, its benefits are limited to improving communication within your own team.

From the same stable, Highrise is a pretty good basic CRM/contact manager and Writeboard is good for basic collaborative document editing, though Google Docs has taken over for much of that, with the advantage that many people already have a Google account.

http://www.37signals.com/

 

[Wintermute]

Gmail rarely goes down and GoogleApps mail is just Gmail with your own domain name, essentially. Yep, I'd trust it.

I didn't say "trust", I said "hand over". This isn't a question of reliability, it's a question of functionality. I know what Google Apps is and I know enough not to start calling Google a bunch of fly-by-night cowboys.

What would you need to do with your server that you don't think you could do with Hosted Exchange? You get a full control panel and a 10 minute "we're on it" SLA for critical issues.

I have no idea. But I've been on the receiving end of far too many "no, we don't support that" or "that's only available with our Premium Gold shaft-you-sideways upgrade package" conversations to risk it.

I am coming at this from a very technical perspective; our requirements are not those of your average company. However, I've yet to find an average company; one whose operations fit exactly the template offered by standardised packages. It's always a matter of compromise. And in pretty much every related experience I can think of, compromising on the way you operate your business in order to fit how someone else thinks you should, ends up failing to live up to expectations.

This is, of course, based on MY experience. I do not, and neither do I claim to, represent the views and requirements of small businesses everywhere. Yes, there is a requirement for hosted solutions. If there wasn't, why would management consultants the world over be selling them? But I think it's important to mention that these solutions DO come at a cost; flexibility, control, whatever you want to call it. The ability to do stuff yourself. It's not a very quantifiable one but it can have a very big and very negative influence on your business.

 

[Wintermute]

I've used Basecamp. I didn't like the way it wouldn't let me do stuff the way I wanted it to and seemed to be set up with some other sort of project-management goals in mind. Other than that, it's a well-written and well-presented piece of software

 

[untethered]

This is, of course, based on MY experience. I do not, and neither do I claim to, represent the views and requirements of small businesses everywhere. Yes, there is a requirement for hosted solutions. If there wasn't, why would management consultants the world over be selling them? But I think it's important to mention that these solutions DO come at a cost; flexibility, control, whatever you want to call it. The ability to do stuff yourself. It's not a very quantifiable one but it can have a very big and very negative influence on your business.

There are obvious tradeoffs between simplicity, cost and flexibility.

If you're technical, you can square the circle much more easily than most people/small organisations who aren't.

Many small organisations spend a disproportionate amount of finite staff time managing IT issues. Minimising that really is important.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I've used Basecamp.

It's pretty good (and I like hosted web apps) but the main benefits come when you invite your clients/partners to participate and log in to the system. In my experience, very often they don't want to learn something new.

Basecamp takes a communication approach to project management rather than a resource-scheduling one. The authors call it the anti-MS Project. If that's where you're at and your clients are happy to use it, great. If not, its benefits are limited to improving communication within your own team.

From the same stable, Highrise is a pretty good basic CRM/contact manager and Writeboard is good for basic collaborative document editing, though Google Docs has taken over for much of that, with the advantage that many people already have a Google account.

http://www.37signals.com/

Well, I like communication when I'm dealing with a project (I freelance, and trying to work out why the hell I'm being asked to do something, or even what I'm being asked to do, can be challenging, so any resources are good, particularly as it's always assumed I know everything about the project from day one) but I think in many cases it's not used properly by the hosting company either. I have had many cases where there's the usual email round-robin of Word docs, and then, eventually, the result might get stuck up on basecamp, after the deadline for implementation.

Incidentally I use Google Docs sometimes in this situation; I don't usually have full posting and upload rights in Basecamp, so I write things in Docs and say "here's the link, you've all got Google accounts, I'll add you so you can comment". As you say, everybody's got a Google account these days, they don't all have Writeboard.

If Docs didn't make offline usage such a pain and there was proper sync, I'd use it all the time, but as it is, I don't use it as much as I'd like to. A lot of the time I may be working off a laptop with intermittent or no net access and I need to get stuff done.

 

[magneze]

There's extensions to OpenOffice allowing you to upload docs straight to GoogleDocs. Best of both words if you like that sort of thing.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=open+office+upload+to+google+docs+extension&ie=UTF-8
(Top two links)

 

[untethered]

If Docs didn't make offline usage such a pain and there was proper sync, I'd use it all the time, but as it is, I don't use it as much as I'd like to. A lot of the time I may be working off a laptop with intermittent or no net access and I need to get stuff done.

I assume they'll implement offline access with Google Gears soon.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Well that won't do me much good either to be honest (though I imagine they will, certainly).

 

[FridgeMagnet]

There's extensions to OpenOffice allowing you to upload docs straight to GoogleDocs. Best of both words if you like that sort of thing.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=open+office+upload+to+google+docs+extension&ie=UTF-8
(Top two links)

Interesting, but (a) can't use proper OO on a Mac anyway and (b) it's still not really sync... web changes don't affect the local doc.

 

[magneze]

True, but if everyone's using OOo then it could be an interesting way to cheaply implement document sharing over multiple sites.

e2a: that's if you don't mind Google having your docs, which I would to be honest.

 

[untethered]

e2a: that's if you don't mind Google having your docs, which I would to be honest.

What do you think they're going to do? Publish a juicy selection of edits on their search home page?

 

[magneze]

What do you think they're going to do? Publish a juicy selection of edits on their search home page?

It's not necessarily Google you have to worry about. They'll be a major target for hackers due to their profile - will your docs be secure?