I have not been shy about sharing my thoughts on cloud computing. It is a huge part of the software future, especially once it becomes profitable.
A company simply cannot charge someone $50-75 a month for high quality help desk software and infrastructure and support and upgrades and be profitable. Maybe at a $100 a month smaller firms begin to break even or turn a small profit, and at around $150 – $200 a month it becomes a growing business. Look at Salesforce.com and that is exactly where their top tier solutions are priced.
This post is not to rehash my thoughts (which I managed to do anyway) but announce that we are beginning to dip our toe in the help desk SaaS world. Starting last week we began to offer evaluations of iSupport’s help desk solution running on Amazon servers (AWS). This provides an excellent way for us to spin up a server that has all the components preconfigured and have you evaluating iSupport in minutes. It removes any complexity of IIS, Windows Server and SQL server. The first prospect that used this service purchased in five days. That is pretty quick for a solution as deep as ours.
Over the next few weeks we will begin to offer the option for you to contract directly with Amazon for the infrastructure* and purchase licenses from us. This will not be a rental model as you will still own your software. I look at it as a way to have the best of both worlds. We will be able to discount our software due to some cost savings on our part and you can trust your data with one of the most reliable data centers on earth. We will even have options for adding the AWS servers to your VPN so asset management and AD integration are viable options.
For now, if you are interested in evaluating iSupport on AWS please contact your account manager, email us at sales@isupport.com, live chat with sales @ isupport.com or give us a ring @ 360-397-1099.
All my best,
Daren
* AWS estimated costs should be $150 – $300 a month based on number of processors and memory. Additional costs for high volumes of data transfer and virtual private cloud services (VPN) which are required for asset management and AD integration will apply.
