At Pulse Business Software, our philosophy is to manufacture business software that is simple and easy to use, in a way that makes sense to business. This philosophy is echoed in the way we design our application by making it uncluttered, straightforward and intuitive to navigate, as well as making Pulse convenient and cost-effective to get up-and-running quickly.
When evaluating a business software product, customers often lose sight of many other costs associated with the implementation, some of which are significant.
These are:
- The cost of hardware (servers) for the application to run on.
- The software cost for the operating system, user licences, database software and the associated seats.
- The technical skills required to maintain and upgrade the server, operating system, application server, database and the application itself.
- Configuring firewalls and other network software and hardware to allow users and customers to access the application without compromising other business applications within the data centre.
- Costs involved in a backup/redundancy solution, especially if one does not currently exist.
- The equipment costs of additional generators, UPSs and other protection equipment to ensure the business still runs even while there are power outages or other faults.
- Callout costs associated with having consultants upgrade the application or attend to other issues.
- To address these issues, Pulse Business Software allows customers the option of hosting our application on our hardware. What this means, in simple terms, is that the customers only need an Internet connection to access the entire Pulse application. It removes the need for expensive and sophisticated hardware installation at the client’s premises, making significant operating cost savings.
The internet connection can be: ADSL, 3G, HSDPA (GPRS can work, albeit slowly) or dedicated ISDN line. The web-based nature of the software makes it remarkably accessible and naturally allows easy access for mobile users or clients as well as foreign users or clients. This gives you complete freedom to access all the systems you need at any time, in any place that provides an internet browser.
What a Hosted Solution will provide
The Pulse Business Software Hosted Solution provides:
- A safe, secure hosted environment.
- A unique domain name for your application; http://customer.pulsesoftware.co.za/
- Secure (username/password) authentication into our application.
- Complete daily backups with hourly incremental backups. Daily backups are written to tape and stored off-site.
- A built in Disaster Recovery Solution in the event of a complete catastrophe.
- Complete disk mirroring to eliminate hardware failures.
- A wireless alternative in the event of the leased line to the server being down for whatever reason.
Our servers are powered by an inline UPS with a backup generator in the event of power outages, load balancing and the like, which means that the server will never be without power. Pulse will ensure that the latest versions of the operating system, device drivers, database servers, application servers, reporting engines and any other components are installed to ensure the optimum performance of our application. All updates to the Pulse application can be done without any disruption to the client and it eliminates the need for onsite technicians to perform updates.
Customer Benefits
In today’s fast moving marketplace, businesses must be dynamic and change quickly, whilst avoiding unnecessary costs. These are a few of the benefits appreciated by our clients using our hosted solution.
- No capital expense on new or upgraded hardware or any additional software licences required to host the application.
- Automatic use of the latest version of the Pulse application.
- No additional bandwidth charges.
- No call-out fees for consultants who would otherwise need to come out on site.
- Protection from load-shedding and other power failures.
- Reduced IT staff overhead and requirement for Pulse staff to have access to the customer’s servers.
- Better generalized privacy. The data can only be accessed via our application and through no other methods.
- Easy access for mobile clients and foreign users.
- Quicker module implementation times.
- Deploying Software as a Service, SaaS, can reduce your company’s carbon emissions by up to 90%
In summary, the Pulse hosted Software as a Service solution takes away any of the administrative and financial overhead of “owning” business software and allows your business to get on with using it.
Some clients still wish to use their own equipment to host our software, and that is no problem – we work to solve our clients problems, so will work in whatever they wish to do.
For more information on the benefits you will gain by using Pulse Business Software’s hosted software solution, Contact Us now for a free consultation.
