application provisioning – Cooper Mann Consulting

Is great customer service the entire customer experience?

I’ve been working with accounting technologies for a long time, and much of that time and activity has been focused on online accounting models and solutions. The Authorized Hosting Program for QuickBooks is a good example of the type of service model that’s garnered a lot of attention over the past couple of years, particularly since desktop QuickBooks editions continue to be the accounting solutions of choice for new and growing small businesses, even as those businesses look to leverage the cloud for remote and mobile access to business information. But hosted QuickBooks delivery models vary tremendously from provider to provider, so how does an accounting professional or their client business owner know which service will suite them best?

At the surface, most of the QuickBooks hosting services available today look pretty much alike. In concept, they are, but in reality the technology each provider elects to deploy makes a big difference in the experience of the hosted service user. Some deployment models require a lot of 3^rd party software to make the service work, and some providers have constructed their own “black box” technology to make the delivery possible. The result is a wide variety of service models and delivery approaches, some of which may perform better or offer more functionality than others. But these details are often difficult to discern when evaluating the various provider deliveries, so most folks simply resort to pricing comparisons. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the best way to measure the quality of the provider or the service. There’s still some truth to the old adage that “you get what you pay for”, even when a service has become commoditized in the market. On the other hand, just because a service is more expensive doesn’t mean it is better.

It is often difficult to get prospective customers to see or understand the technical nuances of any given hosted delivery, so many service providers are trying to find other ways to set themselves apart from the competition. One approach that’s become quite popular is to tout the availability and quality of the customer service offered by the provider. While I do believe that quality customer service should be available for subscribers at all times, I also recognize a bit of a problem with this marketing approach.

To illustrate the problem, I’ll describe a conversation I had with a hosted client last year.

This particular client was with an engineering firm, and the company was subscribing to hosting services for a variety of Microsoft applications, including MS Project (not that it matters, really). Anyway, this client called me up one day just to chat about something that was frustrating him, and that was an issue of irregular system performance. Sometimes it was really speedy, and sometimes things would slow down to a crawl and nobody seemed to know why. He said that he and his team members had been regularly in contact with the support department, and that the support team was always cheerful, helpful, and willing to work with them to find out what the issue might be. Unfortunately, they didn’t find anything, and suggested that the client continue to contact them when there was a problem. This went on for quite a number of months, and the client continued to be frustrated with the service performance but quite pleased with the support response. Then he told me a story.

He said that he used to have a Mercedes, and he loved that car. It was beautiful and fun to drive, and yes, pretty expensive. The car had frequent issues, and for this reason he got to know the guys at the Mercedes dealership really well. He knew all of their names, and they knew his. He even sent them Christmas cards every year. He couldn’t have wished for a nicer group of people to service his vehicle.

Then he bought a Toyota. He really liked this new car, too. It was fun to drive, sporty, and a little more affordable than the Mercedes was. This car didn’t need nearly as much maintenance as the previous one, and he had far fewer problems with it. He never got to know the names of the guys in the service department at the Toyota dealership, because he didn’t go there very often. When he did, the service was fast and courteous – pretty much what he expected. But the best part was that he didn’t become closely acquainted with the dealership service team, because the car just worked.

You know those car commercials on TV, where the sales person is telling the customer about how great the warranty on the vehicle is? Yeah – the one where the customer wants to know if they should buy a good car, or buy a car with a good warranty. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

When you’re looking for a hosting service provider to deliver QuickBooks and other desktop software to you via the cloud, remember that great customer service is only part of the puzzle. The best solution is the one that just works, and doesn’t leave you needing a lot of support.

Are you on a first name basis with your hosting support team? You might want to think about why that is.

Make sense?

Read more about using the cloud to extend your access and collaboration beyond traditional boundaries.

The race to find the “secret sauce” for hosted application services for small business

Cloud computing is here to stay. What was once viewed as bleeding-edge technology fraught with peril and risk is now recognized as an emerging standard for application deployment and delivery. The race to the clouds represents a significant challenge, however, when issues of application interoperability and integration are introduced – particularly when it comes to small business solutions which traditionally reside on the local PC and network.

Today’s available technologies and platforms quite nicely facilitate single application deliveries, yet frequently fail to address the dynamic provisioning and deployment requirements of a rich integrated application environment. Users who desire to select from a variety of applications in a hosted environment are most often met with barriers which won’t allow them to have the particular mixture of solutions they need.

While virtualization approaches for platforms and applications are gaining popularity and increasing in capability, the reality of the problem still rests with the fact that, in order for the applications to integrate, they must be installed on the same machine. There is a race amongst the virtualization platform providers to find the “secret sauce” of application hosting; to enabling a flexible, dynamic, rich application delivery method which overcomes the need to have integrated applications installed together on servers in pre-selected ‘packages’. With the secret sauce, the provider would be able to offer the customer any possible combination of available applications, and offer them as fully integrated solutions, regardless of whether or not those applications were actually installed on a machine together somewhere.

Currently, the solution is addressed (sort of) in how the provider deals with three main elements in the service model, which are packaging, provisioning, and business rules. With these three ingredients appropriately approached in a flexible infrastructure and partner network, the potential for broad hosted application delivery and distribution exists. Service providers are still stuck with the requirement to pre-select their various partner or integrated application inclusions, but it is possible to offer the perception of maximum flexibility without actually having it. The challenge is not presented with the business rules, but in the packaging and provisioning processes.

Packaging is the step where the item to be provisioned is combined with other elements, resulting in a service or installation “package”. Much like a manufacturing assembly process, packaging takes into consideration the total resource utilization or requirement, accounting for all resources combined into or used to create the package. Packaging cannot be performed without first understanding, at a detailed level, what can be provisioned and how. With the variety of applications, data services, implementation methodologies and models which exist, a single method approach has proven to not address a majority of software products currently available on the SMB market, and is unlikely to in the near future.

An example of this challenge is partially revealed when we look at the diversity of applications involved in the Microsoft Office ecosystem. Many businesses rely upon the functionality present on the Office suite desktop products, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For some application users, this functionality is not present in their primary use software, but is presented via desktop level integration methods. In order to deliver the full functionality and capability of the primary use application, the installation and integration support for the Office applications must also be provisioned and packaged into the service. Offering even limited integrations and options like Office for inclusion in the package can introduce challenges in data access and management, permissions and file level security, and ISV licensing of applications. For these and other reasons, attempting to provide a rich, user-selected mixture of deliverables poses the ultimate challenge to the application service provider.

When a cloud or application hosting provider can offer their customers the ability to sign up for, purchase, and utilize without complication or delay their selections of desktop or web-based applications, services and integrations, and pay for them as a subscription service accessible at any time and from anywhere – that’s the secret sauce of application hosting and cloud IT that everyone’s looking for.