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Contents 
Introduction
Gaining traction
Risking it all
Picking your cards
The key that fits
Case study: WebCentral |
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Web hosting company Hostworks looks after the sites of high-profile companies such as ninemsn, Ticketek and Web-based accomodation finder whatif.com. Hostworks managing director Marty Gauvin says reputation can say a lot about a host, but when deciding on a hosted solution there are a number of other areas to take into account. He says it is important to have clear knowledge of the layout of your company and its IT commitments, as well as where staff skills lie and forecasted future growth, downsizing or structual change.
"There are a range of environments where the ASP model is perfect -- branches, if you have geographic spread, or if you are working with a highly variable workforce," Gauvin says. "ASP is also good where you have a company that wants to control costs distributed across products, or different departments. But for some people, buying a licence is much better if the one product will be used over a long period of time -- they can simply host this out if they don't have the expertise to run it."
Salesforce's Farber says the best way to ensure you are buying the right product, and implementing it successfully within your businesses' processes, is to trial the rollout. "You need to have several weeks set aside to do this, and you may need the help of a consultant. Don't assume when building an application on 1 February that this will still fit your business come August -- you have to build in flexibility, then you have to look at testing and planning for rollout," he says.
But before even doing this, you must be absolutely sure that your choice of provision completely fills all your business requirements. Siebel vice president for sales Will Bosma says you should always get your provider to show how the solution will meet its feature functions and run through the strategies for integration that will be needed.
"People tend to focus on performance and security when implementing a hosted solution, but really, what you need is a sensible solution that allows, in two years time when you need to go down the upgrade path, for you to easily change, Bosma says.
"You need that upgrade path mapped so you can logically move to a hosted solution or change over methods of trade or budgeting. In the long run, you may find you can do a lot of things onsite and buy a licensed product. You must look at these things with a three- to five-year horizon," Bosma says.
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