I have reviewed the presentation and found that Tyler did a good job in explaining cloud, the various types of cloud and services offered in the cloud. I really heard nothing new or different that we have presented since 1999! A couple of points that should be clarified:
- The keys to selecting a cloud provider were also well stated. Service Level Agreements are extremely important. The one addition I would make is that the SLA 99.99% is important, but the question is what happens when there is downtime. We have seen a lot of cases where there has been no restitution for downtime.
- The data center points were also very good. Most top level cloud providers have all the certifications listed and multiple locations.
- The cost savings argument for hosting is one I would be very careful with showing a chart that Tyler showed. We have found that the customer rarely buys many of the line items and in his example shows that outsourced IT is 144% of the savings.
When comparing with I-BN Tyler was unsure of our technology:
- We are one of the original Citrix Service Providers (CSPs) and provide dedicated environments similar to iSys
- Our data centers are in Atlanta and Suwanee (> 50 miles apart). Our primary data center has direct connections to the Charlotte and Atlanta internet points and in 13 years at this location the data center was down for <1 minute once. Tyler is correct and is not bi-coastal. We are physically located in between data centers and can be physically onsite at either center in <1 hour. Since Atlanta has no natural disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes or fracking) only nuclear disaster could knock both down.
- A RPO of one hour is also relatively standard. What we have found is that the RPO is talking about replicating an entire storage volume for a client at a point in time. With Sage 100 this may produce an unstable or corrupt Sage 100 database depending upon the size of the customer and the volume of transactions due to the providex database and code. I would be interested in knowing if iSys also has a backup process in addition to data replication and the associated retention policies..
- We did not build our data center, but have a fully compliant government security authorized data center as shown in the videos on our website. References to the age of our infrastructure should come only from I-BN. Historically our hardware averages <2 years in age and more than 50% of our current capacity is < 1 year old.
Pricing from iSys is very standard in the market. Most cloud providers recognize that they are in a commodity market. We would be happy to provide comparative analysis.