Archive for the ‘SaaS’ Category
Jonas Explains Its Product, AND the Cloud
Jonas Construction Software recently updated its website with a complete redesign right down to its colors. While I was looking over its release on the redesign I noticed it had also posted a video that told about its cloud-based enterprise resource planning solution specifically for construction companies. What struck me beyond the overview of the product was that this was also an excellent, visual and easily understandable overview of software as a service, or SaaS. Take a look below by watching the video.
Dexter + Chaney, makers of Spectrum® Construction Software, launches a new version of Spectrum along with a completely new product line for construction operations professionals at the 2012 World of Concrete trade show in Las Vegas Jan. 24-27. The company will display the products at booth C4165 in the central hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The company’s Spectrum offering will not yet be priced as SaaS, according to Wayne Newitts, marketing director, who said the company is keeping its pricing as is for that product. Customers will be able to deploy Spectrum as a self-hosted private cloud, with their own hosting provider or hosted by Dexter + Chaney. If hosted by Dexter the customer will pay a monthly hosting charge that is not based on users or modules.
The new product will however be a web-based offering with subscription pricing as an option. Hosting will be provided by Dexter with on-premise deployments handled on a case-by-case basis, according to Newitts. Here is how he explained the scalability of the offering.
We’ve done extensive testing on loading and storage scenarios for both products, and so we will have a standard hosting price that should accommodate the vast majority of our clients. We will not charge for hosting by number of users or modules. If the amount of hosted resources does not provide adequate performance for a client with many modules and/or users, we will offer incremental resources.
More specifically (and technically) – we provide a VM slice of a server as part of our standard hosting price. If, because of heavy usage, the user requires additional processing power, we will offer an additional VM slice at an incremental cost. Anecdotally, one of our largest clients happens to be here in the Seattle area and is working closely with us to help determine bandwidth, processing, and storage requirements for running our software in a hosted environment. They have a full complement of modules and hundreds of folks use the system, and they work fine on one VM slice.
Dexter will offer storage managed in the same way and in 25GB increments. The default term length will be one year and the company will include price and performance assurances in contracts. Moving to the cloud has been a thoughtful process for Dexter.
About three years ago, company president John Chaney realized the move to cloud computing was inevitable so he invested in new technology and in development resources to take the full features of Spectrum to the web. He reshaped the existing product into a software system that would work in any cloud computing environment. That way, any licensed user could access Spectrum from any device with just an Internet browser.
Chaney also decided to address the needs of the operations side of the construction industry but resisted tacking on an acquisition or addition to the existing product. Instead, he built a team of construction operations experts and worked with construction operations professionals from all parts of the industry to identify real needs before designing the solution. Also built to be completely web-based, this first release from Dexter + Chaney’s new Operations Group addresses the challenges of project collaboration in unique ways.
If you are looking for an enterprise SaaS approach to CRM, sales, accounting, projects, purchasing and inventory you should consider taking a close look at myERP.com. This could be an easy and very inexpensive transition to the cloud for a small construction company or one-person shop. But then again, for just $29 a month any business can have unlimited users on the system.
The reviews are overall very positive. There was some concern by a few reviewers about the privacy of the data someone might store on the company’s servers, but the response from the company seemed to supply some more accurate information, and clear up some misinformation.
Provide a name, email address, company name, account name and then select your type of business from a drop down list of three-General Business, Professional Services or Distribution & Wholesale. Hit the Sign-Up button and you’re on your way.
Google Apps is an interesting offering because its a low-cost way to put your collaboration and communications online and get away from the costs and time you might spend managing those functions with on-premise software. Google claims a leading research firm found Google Apps to cost only a third of what competing offerings might cost.
Besides a very generous 25 GB of email storage per user, mobile access using popular devices and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee, you get a slew of security functions that you can customize. There’s also a wide range of admin and data controls. For example, you can use a provisioning utility and connect your user directory system to Google Apps, saving a lot of time in setup. Also very handy is the fact that you can have single-sign-on, so people can access all areas of Google without having to sign on multiple times. The cost for business use is $50 per user, per year.
Another simple step into the cloud is Google Docs. On the word processing application there’s no helvetica and only 17 typefaces available. Points go up to 72. The editing interface is like a typical blog interface with bold, italic, underline, text color, background color, link, add picture and the formatting options related to bullets and numbering, spacing and alignment.
Using the other applications included in Google Docs you can create spreadsheets, presentations, forms and drawings. There are thousands of templates you can search and choose from so you don’t have to create everything from scratch. Having to weed through so many though might make it more efficient to just create the document you need if those needs are fairly simple.
To share, you can download the document in these formats: ODT, PDF, RTF, TXT, Word, HTML. Send your creation to print preview, and then print it using the printer attached to your local computer. Another option is to mark the file for sharing so when others are logged in to Google Docs they can see it and even interact with it.
Of course, if you have poor Internet service that is slow, erratic, or both, then owning the software will be a better idea. For everybody else who just needs to create basic content and documents, Google Docs offers a simpler and cheaper method.
In theory, a small construction shop could blend these three offerings to cover most of their business software needs. Larger shops could use them to handle special projects or those times when they need an immediately scalable collaboration or content creation platform that anybody with an ounce of computing skill could use effectively.
Take all your servers and that rack of hard drives and give them to your local recycler. Cloud computing using SaaS means you don’t need them anymore. At least not if you choose to use SaaS virtualization technology in the public cloud. In the process you can get out of the information technology business and back into your construction, architecture or engineering business.
“The idea behind SaaS virtualization is you use the application in its native format but you do it remotely,” says R. Byron Attridge, Jr., executive vice president at ClubDrive Systems, Inc. You connect directly to a cloud server instead of using a Web browser to access the application. It’s just another form of SaaS and one that many are embracing because they want to get out of the IT business and back to their core construction, architecture or engineering businesses.
Beyond the cost savings of not having to maintain, power, cool and replace hardware, there are some performance improvements.
“When you are running applications on high performance servers you get a lot better performance than running them through a Web browser,” explains Attridge. “ If you have an old machine that is painfully slow and you’re running the application on a Web browser it’s going to run poorly. But, if you access the same application with the same old machine using virtualization technologies you’re not going to see any kind of performance degradation because it’s not running on the machine. The application is having to accept key strokes and mouse clicks but that kind of data can be highly compressed, and it isn’t resource intensive.”
Attridge also says that in most cases the data is secure since it never resides on the device you use, and you can use any device that is capable of connecting to the Internet. That includes smart phones, normal laptops and desktops and even thin clients.
Thin clients, sometimes called zero clients, are functional boxes that have no hard drive. When you turn them on, they connect to your cloud provider and render the application on the screen. Also equipped with USB and Ethernet ports they can be attached to many peripherals including a router for making the Internet connection. While thin client technology is robust and highly functional it is not without potential drawbacks.
There have been at least a couple of cases where thin client network security has been called into question. In one case in August of 2009, NCC Group based in Manchester, UK claimed it had uncovered serious concerns about thin client security. NCC is an IT consultancy. As reported by Tech Target in its Information Security News, NCC found five ways the units could be compromised. It tested units from Wyse, HP and VXL.
In its April 2010 white paper “Evaluating Thin Client Security in a Changing Threat Landscape,” Intel raised concerns related to thin clients and the centralization of data, although the same concerns also applied to PCs. Intel concluded that, “while the controls often associated with thin clients can contribute to a more secure environment, they would not have provided protection against recent zero-day attacks.”
While no technology is bulletproof AEC businesses adopting SaaS using virtualization technology can find some attractive subscription models that might make kicking the software-in-a-box habit look pretty good.
ClubDrive for example, maintains a service provider licensing agreement with Microsoft so it can resell the use of Microsoft products to its clients. Users simply log on and use whatever applications in the MSOffice suite they need at the time. The user pays a monthly fee to ClubDrive for using the software.
If you want to use your favorite estimating program but ClubDrive does not have a licensing agreement with that vendor then you continue to license the software while using it on ClubDrive’s servers. That eliminates software conflicts and maintenance, troubleshooting and the hardware maintenance you would normally have if you hosted it on your own equipment. Attridge says the cost varies greatly but for people who want core Microsoft products along with several other software packages a typical cost is $125 per user per month.
Perhaps the biggest reason to consider SaaS using a virtualization model is the migration it offers back to your core business.
“Nobody started a construction firm wanting to get into IT,” says Attridge. “You end up having to manage it because it provides you with tools that you need to have. However, at the same time you’re having to manage it more than you ever wanted to. With that in mind, we developed a service like this so businesses can get out of the IT business and back to their businesses.”
By some accounts, moving your construction communication and collaboration to the cloud is more secure than locking it behind a server on premises. At least that’s how Derrick Martin, technology architecture consultant for Slalom Consulting describes it. The company supports the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, a SaaS offering that includes hosted Exchange 2010, Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
“Microsoft put a fantastic amount of time and resources into attaining federal security certifications so the hosted Exchange environment that allows you to have Outlook and Exchange means your company’s data is sitting in an environment that can have multiple federal certification standards,” explained Martin in an exclusive interview. “So increasing security by leveraging the cloud is one of the very first things that we talk to clients about because it is absolutely the case that when you are able to hand a customer federal certification saying (their data) is secure, not only do they know where their data is but they also know who has access.”
Beyond the security though, Martin also points out some significant savings companies may find from SaaS, claiming the total cost of ownership inside the cloud is 60 to 70 percent less than having the same software and data storage on site. He says that even a modest on-premises collaboration environment can cost anywhere from $20 to $30 per month, per user in total cost of ownership. However, by harnessing the cloud, companies can reduce those expenses to $5 to $10 per month, per user. That’s significant even for small companies. The move also increases return on investment (ROI) because the expense moves from capital expenditures to operational expenditures.
“Now it’s just an operational expense so your ROI has gone up and you also have increased your security footprint giving you a much more robust, secure environment from which to operate,” Martin said. “It cuts legal costs, overhead, hardware expense, software expense, staff, and down time – if email is not available, money is being lost.”
Many small construction shops don’t have the expertise to maintain an Exchange environment. Maintaining an Exchange server, maintaining all the availability, the firewalls, the Internet connections, provisioning, storage, handling the backups - all require significant amounts of time and training, Meanwhile, email is a critical function in any industry, and it must be available. Martin maintains these server environments are not only difficult to maintain, but costly as well.
“It doesn’t matter of you’re a five person shop or a five-million person shop those environments are very complicated to maintain,” he said. “Gartner released a study showing that on average, the maintenance of an on-premises collaboration environment costs around $33 per user, per month. That takes into account the power, the time it takes to patch the servers, the licensing fees and the backups.” He also points out the cloud is much simpler and in most cases it’s a matter of pointing, clicking and provisioning.
By leveraging things like the experience and capacity and redundancy of the cloud, small to medium sized AEC businesses, without great expense, can have all of the same tools and high value infrastructure that the big players have.
Leveraging the cloud as a data repository also increases the opportunities for collaborating with partners, subs, owners and vendors.
“By leveraging the cloud to be the data repository you then enable a federation model where vendors and customers and suppliers can gain access to data without being routed through your firewall,” said Martin. “So you can make your information available in a targeted way to others who may need access to it, and in a way that will allow them to maintain a very high degree of security.”
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