General Consultant Discussion

Has anyone used Amazon Workspaces recently to create a desktop with a test version of Sage 100 for a prospective customer to review and assist with pilot testing? I tried workspaces several months ago and at the time they had two main issues: a. They charge for bandwidth so it costs to plop a Dropbox on their system to sync (plus it uses disk space that they charge for also) b. In order to create an image of the desktop you needed more disk space (enough to hold a copy of the current desktop) I'm not sure if I'm overlooking something or if this is all part of the joy of subscription where everything becomes an unanticipated add-on.

I, too, would love to know more about this. @GaryFeldman - have you guys looked into this at all?

The last time we analyzed costs against Amazon (mid 2013) we found that they were slightly less expensive than our retail infrastructure charges given certain assumptions - Add the lowest cost of antivirus and backup (replication and backup are not the same and anti-virus is necessary) - Did not buy their top level support and (we provide somewhere between their middle and top level and we know apps) - You signed a long term contract. (not required with us) On a wholesale basis they were not a good option for us because of restrictions in your ability to migrate virtual servers to their environment (everything must be built in Amazon to work in Amazon and you must pay for that too!). For customers we believe the costs end up being higher when you add the fact that a third party must manage the environment because Amazon is just infrastructure. It is just like buying servers versus our service in that the costs look lower when you remove the soft costs. Some partners we have worked with like Amazon because they charge for the infrastructure management we provide. Others do not like Amazon because the actual cost is hard to estimate and are public making it hard to mark up to a sophisticated customer. Then again some of those ""sophisticated"" customers think they can do everything themselves and we add no value. Most of the partners we have worked with that either moved to or currently use Amazon are on the SAP side because if their partnership with SAP. It was a really hard evaluation for us to perform because many of the costs are variable based upon how you use the environment where I aggregate costs and average across a class of customers. Because of all the work they have done with virtualization of the HANA in memory compute platform (believe it or not, less scalable than physical appliances) we are planning to evaluate again as their costs have fallen some and ours have remained relatively constant due to higher hardware requirements for Windows and SQL 2012 and higher costs for SQL Server.

I'm looking at the Amazon Workspaces (single workstation vs server). Cost is dependent upon processor, memory and whether you use MS Office. I see this as a quick way to provide access to a working demo without having to leave a laptop or install a copy of Sage 100 to the user's network. The two gotcha's that I found previously (actually 3): a. Need to install apps to the USER folder or you can't image or backup those apps (they seem to have solved this by removing an option to access C:) b. Internet bandwidth for file transfer is additional (not sure that's still the same) c. In order to image the workstation - you had to have enough disk space locally to hold the image - which when I looked meant an almost certain upgrade of file storage. Not sure this is still true. There are probably smarter ways to setup and use Amazon for this type of pilot testing. I do it rather infrequently so this type of on-demand pricing is attractive especially when it saves me from driving to a prospect and spending time setting up and leaving a laptop demo with them. I'm just getting started taking a look at this again and will post my thoughts in a bit. So far I chose the $50/mo option and expect to use it for no more than a month or two then stop usage without needing to save anything on the workspace.

http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/

There is a LOT of odd stuff (see attached) such as if you want to image your system it can't be over 10GB , have to have enough C: space and you must install to d:\users\username\ (whereas the Amazon workspaces just says install to D:). In my experience, I was never able to get the imaging to work properly on Amazon Workspaces. I believe I looked at it and it was a constant upsell - more space, store files in a specific location (which is poorly documented until you try to pull the trigger and actually make an image). After you've installed and configured three applications it's a little tough to move them to exactly where Amazon needs, then you learn you don't have enough disk space to image.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/adminguide/images.html

Bare Sage 100 2016 + Crystal Reports pushes the size of user folder to about 11 GB - so I guess you're supposed to image each application individually.

Something else you might want to look at: VMware Workstation 10 lets you create encrypted VMs with expiration dates that can be run in VMWare Player (free for the prospect).

@WayneSchulz how often do you leave some sort of demo install at a prospect's? We did it one time and they thought it wasn't user friendly. Of course, they didn't want to spend much time with us on setups or training. We did not want to but they insisted. Guess how that one turned out? No sale.... Others? Do you leave a sample install for them to test drive?

In this case it's a prospective new customer who has light MFG (think BOM as WO) and is not terribly sophisticated. They seem very eager to buy which makes me nervous because there's no reasonable way to know every aspect of their BOM process. I'm trying to resolve two issues at once - let them look at Sage 100 and then run a few sample transactions to be sure the software can meet their needs. It's a referral from a CPA so I am taking more time than I normally would. For an Internet lead I'd never spend more than an hour or two with pre-qualification then if they wanted to do a pilot I'd charge them something. Overall I have the same experience as you. Virtually no prospect comes away from ""let me play around with the software"" with a positive outcome. And most never even open up the program. I don't want to install to their desktop with my keys (or leave in trial mode) since they are about 1.5 hour one way trip. So the investment in Amaon Workspaces seems like a good way to limit my downside, investigate using this for future use (I'd definitely want to have a way to create these desktops from an image) and cut out a lot of travel just for the initial due dilligence. In a perfect world I'd have an image for Sage 100 2015, one for Sage 100 2016. Then on demand create a one month workstation account for $50. The user can login from wherever they are. I can login to the same desktop (not at the same time) for setup and configuration. Not perfect but a reasonably convenient inexpensive option.

FYI - We provide free demo access to Sage 100 for partners in our environment. Typically this is vanilla and I do not believe we have 2016 up yet for partners. We setup a copy of ABC, MFG, etc. for the user to configure as they want. You can VI data and whatever you need for the demo. For partners who have customers in our environment, we will even provision a Sage 100 server for prospect who needs a specific add-on for you to install and configure for a 30 day period at no cost as well. When customers demo in our cloud they are more likely to buy in our cloud.