Before handing over your IT requirements to a host, you had better learn to play all your cards right.
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Contents 
Gaining traction
Risking it all
Picking your cards
The key that fits
Case study: WebCentral |
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It is 11am in Sydney and the prominent and very important hosted Web site for the mobile phone product this particular employee manages has a slight but embarrassing hitch. A pointer leading to "extra" mobile features, a selling point for this particular phone plan, brings up a dead link -- tear-your-hair-out material when you already have a massive workload and hefty company demands to deal with, not to mention the cost of lost sales.
It is 2am in Cape Town. A delegate from a call centre for a hosted solution provider picks up the phone. He is told of the manager's problem with their popular Web site and the urgency required in fixing this -- this is not the first time a staffer at the host has had such a call. His response is the same as that to numerous other calls he has received to fix problems with the hosted Web site -- the person with the skills to do this is sleeping and will not get around to it until they come back into work in the morning, Cape Town time.
One week on, a similar problem occurs. The now even more frustrated product manager places a call to the host in South Africa, only to be hung up on. As a last straw, the service level agreement (SLA) written up by previous staff members looking after this account is called upon with the hope of sorting this mess out contractually. Low-and-behold, the company is locked in for the next few years promising this product manager many more weeks like the ones just described.
Problems like this aside, this telecommunications company is actually in favour of hosting out its IT requirements to companies with the expertise to look after these vital areas of productivity. The problem for this company in particular lies mostly in a poor SLA, which lacks vision and includes way too much trust in the abilities of the provider.
Their situation is not a standalone case. Many companies have been lured by the promise of the Hosted Application Service Provider (ASP), operations with promising names such as "Hostopia" (we have no horror stories at Hostopia itself, we are simply pointing out the opportunistic name), some which offer toll-free technical support, money-back guarantees, and secure and reliable services.
| "The market is $6.5 million for [hosted] CRM alone in Australia." -- Foad Fadaghi, Frost and Sullivan |
Some ASP offerings provide an excellent service, making them a worthwhile business choice. Others simply burden business with a haphazard attitude to looking after clients, poor tailoring of abilities, or poor technical support.
In the 30 or so that years hosted solutions have been around, success has been hit and miss. But now hosted applications seem to be getting a good grasp in industries big and small as companies see the benefit of ditching licensing fees in favour of a more transparent monthly cost and the promise of expertise in fields that may not be their forte.
6%
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