General Consultant Discussion

Another take on @MarkChinsky's favorite tech topic: Cloud. I'm looking for comments triggered by this article, showing clear inroads by Google into MS application space. We recently had a small prospect that had only Mac's inhouse -- they are a design firm. Their business ops were run completely with salesforce (a real mismatch in many ways) and Google Docs. Email, spreadsheets (beaucoup!), word docs all Google. Customer service and product prep managed using salesforce. This article is essentially saying that firms are using Google for those shared development needs, and it strikes me that using cloud source for business management apps (ERP, CRM) makes sense in that way. It can force all business communication and work into shared spaces, with no local saving. http://ubm.io/1b4TfkM

Why does 'cloud source' make sense for ERP? I won't argue CRM given that a high percentage of salespeople are on the road or at least spread out. But ERP users vastly tend to be fixed to a single location, or locations within a fixed and secure WAN. When was the last time you were on a line in Costco wishing you could enter a journal entry or purchase order from your 3.5"" to 4"" iphone screen??

It makes sense when you have multi-offices or if you're in a situation where a third party like a CPA or VC wants close access to the information with minimal setup/maintenance. Other than that it does not make a lot of sense and most people when they investigate the cost will determine that.

Even that, in the rare case where the CPA wants to learn each clients ERP system, how hard is RDP to setup? It's completely built into Windows. Since 2008, its incredibly painless, including remote printer support. To choose an ERP system that's browser based just for that ability, seems kind of odd

It's likely more than RDP -- at least in theory -- how about a dashboard of your client accounts, a way to receive alerts for specific activity. Can you set that up now? Well yes to a large extent you can. Customers who are savvy enough can manage a Knowledgesync by themselves. But again remember we are entering the era of consumer IT -- this is code for ""get rid of the need for a consultant to set this all up"" .

Show me an ERP system for a 20 million dollar complex distributor that 'installs and implements like a phone app with no need for consultants' And every vendor that has EVER claimed some type of 'fast start' simple fixed fee implementation plan to help sell new software, has yet to show me a successful implementation that hasn't turned into a traditional complex and much more expensive project

Sell the sizzle ... deliver the steak. Do not disagree with you.

There is certainly segmentation among SMB customers for this. My initial example was one that did not want a Windows server in house. Period. In addition to Wayne's examples, we have remote workers with SO's and customer history. Yes, CRM is part of that, but I'm skeptical of just how much. Has anybody seen forecasts of how cloud pricing (pupm) will change in the next 5 yrs? I don't mean salesforce, as I don't think those apps will lower pricing, but the IaaS vendors? I think these could drop in half. Zenith Infotech (yes, I know it has other business challenges) offers an interesting product that lets a VAR take a fixed-price NAS and BDR device and plug it into a white labelled compute host. For about $11k + compute server you get a 6-TB system that will host quite a few VM's on it. My point is that with sort of pricing/capability out there now, the pupm pricing for cloud platforms will come down. With a network device for the office, you then have capability to support BYOD simply, with little security threat through virtualized desktops. This will appeal to many, but not all. Those will be ok with some premium above straight financial equivalence and the added ""hardness"" of a data center. So I think the shift to ""cloud"" whether private (on prem) or ""public"" will continue as virtualization of business apps, whether via browser or some form of RDP, progresses. And Mark is quite right about the implementation. Virtualization of the app removes only some of the server installation complexity, not the large bulk of the implementation effort. But I don't think customers will really understand that until they experience it.

I personally think rapid drops in prices of SSD's and Vmware/Hyper-V have pushed the equation back to on-premise. You can buy a 1U server (it's thinner than a box of pizza) with enough compute, speed redundancy & reliability to blow your socks off for between $8k & 15K. You can easily run 10 Virtual servers in a box like this now. You typically will get alot more RAM, drive speed and CPU cycles per server than most IAAS providers will give you. Given the slowing down of Moores law IMHO, this box is good for a solid 5 years. With a good MSP who monitors and manages it remotely, I'd be willing to bet the 10 year cost, including one hardware refresh is 50% to 80% less than cloud pricing. It could even host 20-30 remote desktops if you go with thin terminals as long as they aren't heavy CAD users.

@JerryNorman - if you're looking for the price to drop for cloud hosting, it has and we can show you how with an infrastructure that allows businesses (large or small) to roll out a BYOD environment. I'll contact you offline but we can show the same to anyone else that is interested.

@MarkChinsky - Did you know that SSD drives wear out and when they do they are not covered under warranty because that is not broken, just end of life. @BrianRice - We are in the process of purchasing another failed VARs BYOD environment. Many do not recognize what an SLA is and how to provide disaster recovery, redundancy etc. At the Sage Summit meeting I hosted one of the mobile app roundtables. You would be amazed at how many customers have different remote access needs. Whether it is providing a customer portal into your ERP, a mobile application for trade show and remote sales, use of limited rights users for a TPL location, the list is a lot longer than most people can imagine. The cloud has not reached its potential yet. We are working with Pivotal Bridge and Fisher Technology to offer cloud based integration services (cloud to cloud, on-premise - cloud, etc.). We are working to offer B1A (analytics for B1) as a service, and many other components that will be pre-aggregated and pre-integrated. When they are available on a price list then the cloud will have even more value. @JerryNorman - Prices are still dropping. As ISVs extend the payback period and lower VAR compensation (reality), the price per user goes down. You would not believe the cost reductions we are seeing in our hardware and the density increases we are achieving as we scale. We have lowered prices every other year or so, or have bundled more services in for the same cost. it will continue to a point, but will likely slow in pace until we can get Microsoft out of the equation. They are our only infrastructure cost which continues to grow in both raw $ and % of revenue.

I'm no expert here, but my understanding is that Enterprise SSD's have numerous redundant internal storage banks to handle any failures and are promising 10 year minimum life spans, which is far longer than most people would keep a server. That being said, SSD's haven't been around 10 years so one never really. Ancedotally, I was an early SSD adopter with a 128gig SSD that I paid nearly $500 for about 4 years ago. Thing still is just like new and is blazing fast without a hiccup. Unlike the numerous physical drives I have had that have failed. My latest 1TB drive now freezes constantly and then pulls the data. It's just my gaming drive so I don't care so much, but now I have to clone it and address the problem. SSD's are clearly the future just as touch screens on phones were in 2008/2009. It's just gonna take a bit more time. Spinning drives will remain around probably another decade or so, but primarily for bulk backup storage. This is where the Carbonite's of the world will store backup data, but not where daily transactions will occur.

Gary, the guts of your commentary, the integration, was lurking under my comments. It's not clear to me how much that integration capability will also move outside of large cloud, but until then, I suspect that it will provide significant benefit for lots of cloud customers, in ways that aren't really clear quite yet.

We are looking at some enterprise class SSD arrays, In evaluating the arrays we were told to tier our storage with SSD's and traditional drives. In trying to translate the technospeak into modern English. SSDs come in SLC and MLC (single and multiple per cell) to extend their lives and that striping with automated raid calculations was important. The SSDs can only take so many writes so when you write multiple times per cell they are more efficient but wear out faster. So the latest storage technology will read the data into the array on SSD RAID 10 and then move it to the appropriate area (type of storage) in the array based upon usage patterns. Very slick

Curious on the % performance gain over RAID 10 SAS 15k Drives