RoseASP Dynamics Hosting

Hosting complex ERP systems is not an easy thing to do.  Whether you host your ERP system on premise or off site, there’s a lot to do to maintain connectivity, system performance, and provide good security and data backup.  To do all of these things well, you have to know the ERP application very well.

Consider this:

• If the system engineer doesn’t know the application well, the chance that the correct data backups will not be done, the wrong service pack will be applied, etc., goes up significantly.
• If an end user is experiencing a system problem, and the system engineer doesn’t know the system well, the time to resolve the problem increases dramatically.
• If the ERP application is not available because of some unrelated technical issue, infrastructure software problems, loss of power, or network disruption, productivity decreases because the system is not available to use.

These are fairly common issues people experience with their ERP systems.  If you’re considering hosting your ERP application off-site, consider strongly a hosting company that knows the applications well; not someone that’s just running a bunch of machines.

Anya Ciecierski of CAL Business Solutions discovers convincing evidence at WPC.

“A worn-out unfounded rumor that some competitors use to inspire doubt in Dynamics ERP buyers has been; “Microsoft owns 4 ERP products now, is Dynamics GP going away?”  The answer is NO.  I am at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this week, meeting with the managers who make those decisions. And the answer is clear – Microsoft Dynamics GP is here to stay.  No question. And if there was ever any doubt about the popularity of Dynamics GP all you have to do is look at the statistics for June 2010.  Last month, June 2010, more customers bought Microsoft Dynamics GP in just ONE WEEK than in the whole month of June 2009. In fact, twice as many.  This was the largest customer add month in GP history.”

The full article is here.

As you may have seen in the press, Quickbooks On-Line and many of the Quickbook products have been down since Tuesday, June 15 at 7:00 p.m. PST. We do wish them well in a speedy recovery, but wanted to take a moment and chat with our customers about the RoseASP infrastructure and recovery planning.
It would seem that Quickbooks must have had a single point of failure problem, as the service is completely down, and cannot bring one customer up, unless they all come up.

RoseASP infrastructure is made of several, recoverable, customer specific pieces. As a dedicated or shared user on our system, you are on your own instance of SQL server, own instance of Microsoft Dynamics, your own specific company connection, and your own instance of any third-party systems. Each one of these systems that you use to run your company has a redundant piece of equipment on-site and a redundant piece of equipment offsite for use in a disaster. Not only are the databases backed up nightly, weekly and monthly, so is your specific configurations of users and Dynamics.

By keeping your systems independent but part of a larger computing environment you have the advantage of very specific software installation with the ability to leverage a much larger redundant
infrastructure and support system.

Let’s give a couple examples. In the event someone has a corrupt database, this would affect only one company, not all companies. In this event, we would take down that one company’s database and system to try to repair the database. If we could not repair that specific database, we would go to a back-up of that database and restore that specific database. Again this would and could only affect one company at a time.

Another example would be hardware failure. If we lose a specific piece of hardware, they are in redundant pairs. The redundant pair would take over for the existing system and at worst case your users would lose the last couple of transactions they are working on. Specifically, in the case of Quickbooks on-line, apparently the outage was due to some redundant power features not working correctly. RoseASP has taken the added step of having its own redundant power outside of the redundant power for our Data Centers. Therefore, should there be a sudden loss in power with our Data Center, Rose servers will remain up and running for a period of time, which we believe will be sufficient enough for our Data Centers to recover.

Should the unfortunate event occur that an entire data center is lost due to a natural disaster we would restore our backups to a secondary data center where we have database servers, and terminal service servers up and running. This case would take several hours, but not days. And in this situation we would be coordinating with our customers to prioritize what systems need to come up first, second, etc. This allows us to be very specific about bringing up mission critical systems.

If you have specific questions about the many safeguards RoseASP has in place to protect your business, we’re happy to answer them.

In the ERP space some software developers are changing the way they license their products. The change is from an up-front charge for a perpetual license, to a periodic charge for a periodic license.

This change is powered by the following changes in the market:

• Software-as-a-Service providers typically sell their licenses on a periodic basis; either monthly or annually
• Current economic conditions make lower up-front costs attractive to users

This change in the way that users perceive they can purchase software licenses is putting pressure on all software developers to provide a periodic license option.

These are reasons why software developers might resist offering a periodic licensing option:

• Getting the license fee all up front is considered better than receiving a stream of revenue over time
• Periodic billing adds administrative complexity
• Control over license usage is difficult or impossible

Let me suggest why software developers should offer a periodic license option:

• The preference for periodic licensing is growing, and if software developers want to appeal to a growing number of users, they will want to find a way to provide this option
• Their competitors are doing it
• Generally in business a stream of revenue is preferable to a lump sum, because it allows the business to better plan their operations
• Concerns over protecting software developers’ intellectual property are mitigated when a third party hosting company is involved to administer license usage, user invoicing, and collections

To help move to offering a periodic license option, I have suggested to software developers that they conceptually separate the consulting, customization, and implementation fees from the software license. It’s reasonable that the consulting, customization, and implementation fees be invoiced up front or as they are delivered, since the costs for these services to the developer are generally incurred for specific implementations and during the period of the implementation. The value received by the user for using software is generally realized over a period of time, and generally represents no additional costs to the developer. The developer is merely receiving a royalty for the substantial investment they have made in developing software. It makes sense that the user is invoiced in conjunction with the value they receive from using the software.

The change is taking place. If you’re a software developer, do you want to participate?

Most of my better blog posts come from discussions with prospects and customers considering a SAAS or Hosted solution using Microsoft Dynamics. The most recent conversation I had with a prospect was around “whose data is it”? Mine, or yours? Well of course that gave me a great introduction to talk about how we (the Microsoft channel) really differentiate ourselves from other SAAS solutions vendors. I am not going to claim to be an expert on NetSuite, but after talking to a few of their customers it appears that the data is not really theirs. So, if they ever planned on moving to another system those years of historical data, unless they can be dumped into excel from some custom reports, cannot be moved. This clearly creates a dilemma, especially if you need (due to SOX compliancy requirements) or want to maintain historical information, for year over year reporting. Unless you continue with the service, where will you put this historical information and how will you be able to access it?
On the other hand, when a prospect chooses a Dynamics solutions either hosted by Microsoft (CRM) or one of the ERP solutions, hosted by partners, this data can always be brought “on-premise” in totality. Which would you pick as a customer???

Please help us to understand your current experience with Dynamics ERP Hosting.

This survey should take less than five minutes and you will have an opportunity to win a $500 American Express gift card.

The winner will be drawn at the completion of Convergence, April 27th.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/T63H88Z

The next major release of GP will be Dynamics GP 2010.  Microsoft continues to design and deliver the product to be easier to use and to be a more effective business tool for getting things done and reporting results.

There are a number of functionality enhancements and richer connections with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft technologies.

We are presenting a sneak peek of the new version on March 24th.  Check out the details here.

This is an easy way to review the new release, so I expect you to be on-line with us on the 24th, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm PDT.

Go straight to the Click to Attend site here.

There will be a short discussion of CustomerSource immediately following, at 12:00pm.  Are you using CustomerSource?

I recently had a prospect send me a competing quote from another Dynamics hosting company. He sent it to me because he was so confused and needed my assistance to help him compare “apples to apples”.

If you don’t live and breathe “hosting” or “SPLA pricing” everyday, it is a difficult and daunting task to compare various hosting quotes. I thought I would share some tips and “traps” that will help you and your prospects through this process.

First, don’t get sucked in by the provider with the lowest price! After you look carefully line item by line item you will quickly realize that you are going to be charged for every little component which will quickly add up. Here are some examples:

1. Are you being charged extra for Microsoft Office (Word and Excel) which are really necessary to run Dynamics properly these days. The quote that I saw was charging an extra $30 per user/ per month.

2. Are you being charged extra for storage? Each hosting provider should be offering you some amount of storage as part of their monthly fee. Find out how much!!! And find out how much you will be charged for storage after you reach the allotted amount.

3. Make sure you have the ability to email or PDF out of the Dynamics system. Many providers charge an extra amount for Adobe or another PDF writer.

4. Find out how you will be accessing your Dynamics data. Is your provider using Terminal Services, Citrix or VPN. Also make sure you can access your data from anywhere!!! I am amazed at how sometimes providers only allow you to access the data from your office – I mean really, what’s the point of using a hosting provider that doesn’t allow you to access your data from anywhere!!!

5. Drill down on what the setup fees cover. This too can vary from provider to provider. Does it include the ENTIRE application including the latest Service Packs? Who is responsible for installing the ISV solutions? The consulting group or the hosting group. Do you get a test company, or the just Fabrikam? Does it include all the SSRS and Excel based reports??

6. If custom development work is being provided as part of your solution, where is that development environment being deployed? Will you have to pay extra for a server?

7. Will you be charged extra for web services??? I have found that most hosting providers don’t even know how to address this.

8. How will the upgrade work and who is responsible for doing it? Some providers build that into their monthly fee, others don’t cover it at all. Your customer needs to clearly understand the difference.

9. Where is your application actually being deployed? On a virtual image or on a shared box? How is the CPU and RAM being managed? Find out the specifications of the box that your database is being deployed on. Also find out where the client is being deployed and the CPU allotted to each. There is a big difference between a virtual image, a shared SQL box and a dedicated box. Make sure you understand what you are getting.

10. Finally, what happens after your contract term is over, or if you want to bring the solution “on-premise”. What is the maximum amount of price increase that is allowed after the term of the contract? (Are you getting a great price in the first year, but it goes way up come year two?) And if you decide to bring the solution “on-premise”, find out what the format is that your data will be given to you, and how transferable it is to a new system. But most importantly find out the price for that NOW!!

So to summarize; what was originally a $195 per user/ per month quote, turned out to be more like $399 a user per month after you add in all the required elements!!!.

If you need help deciphering your hosting quotes, feel free to drop me a line anytime at linda@roseasp.com .

The key to hosting Dynamics GP or any other Dynamics (or you can say what separates the men from the boys) is the ability to host ISV solutions as well. For many years developers have been creating solutions to round out the Dynamics product lines.

For a Hosting company to really be success and to service their customers well they need to be able to hosting ISV solutions successfully. After 9 years of hosting I am very happy to announce our list of ISV solutions hosted by RoseASP:

• Avalara for Sales Tax
• Azox for eCommerce
• Ethotech for commissions
• Greenshades for payroll
• Integrity Data, Mc2
• Mekorma for MICR
• Nodus for CC
• Nolan for Intercompany
• eOne for integrations
• PaperSave for Document Management
• Olympic for Project Costing
• Rockton
• Sales Pad for Order Entry
• Scribe for Integrations
• Solver
• Tensoft and Vsync for EDI

Please visit www.roseasp.com/partners to learn more about these great solutions that are now available for hosting.