By David Goodwin, Principal and Co-Founder, ATC

Much has been written and discussed lately about Software as a Service (SaaS). I agree with the notion that the market for SaaS will eventually catch up to the hype. Customers typically dictate how quickly some of these new technologies emerge. By that, I mean, if the customers are calling for it, then the agents/consultants will quickly learn how to deliver it.

On the flip-side, if the agents can be early adopters, then they can help educate their customers on the benefits of SaaS and help them understand why they need to implement it on some level. We try to stay ahead of the curve, so therefore we usually take the latter approach.

Our M.O. at ATC is that one of the best ways for us to learn and understand a product, service and/or technology is to use it ourselves. We’ve done it with Treo, BlackBerry, audio/Web conferencing, VoIP and now SaaS. We recently partnered with 19 Marketplace to migrate to their Hosted Exchange, BlackBerry Enterprise Server and anti-virus services. We also added increasingly important backup capabilities. Lastly, we will soon be migrating our company fileserver over to SharePoint. The services are relatively easy to provision and manage using the Workplace2go online portal.

The BlackBerry Enterprise Server and backup utilities were easy to implement. The migration to Hosted Exchange was a bit more time consuming, but that all comes down to how much data is in your e-mail file, bandwidth limitations and overall PC computing horsepower. Their anti-virus solution has gotten rid of 30-50 unwanted emails per person each day.

Overall, the migration to a SaaS environment reminds me of a quote by Abraham Lincoln. He said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” The point is (no pun intended), it’s important to spend time developing a good migration plan and understanding all of the steps along the way. This makes the process much smoother and helps to reduce the number of hiccups along the way.

The fact that we do not have the resources in-house to manage these services, combined with the appeal of having all services with one provider, on one bill, made this an attractive option for our company. These, and others, are the same reasons that SaaS would be an attractive solution for an existing and/or prospective customer, especially in the SMB space where (time and money) resources are much more limited.

David Goodwin co-founded Advanced Technology Consulting Inc. (ATC) in 1999 to introduce a new approach to selecting, managing and optimizing telecommunications services. He leveraged more than a decade of experience at Cable & Wireless where he learned all aspects of the telecom industry and earned national awards for his performance.