The ugly secret is out. When you move your clients to a typical QuickBooks hosting provider, you eventually loose your clients. But, it probably won’t happen right away. If you’ve done any QuickBooks work, you know that QuickBooks requires on going support, a lot of on going support.
Every time your client calls your QuickBooks hosting provider, your QuickBooks hosting provider experiences another targeted sales opportunity. Eventually, you loose control and your client will receive all of their computer systems support from your QuickBooks hosting provider. It’s the next clear ASP industry wide agenda, called HaaS or hardware as a service or Secure Remote Desktops.
You can capitalize on two potential pitfalls with the ASP model. First, you never know where the data center for a particular “ASP” might be located. I know one “ASP” that’s data center is in their office. Second, your client’s required to upload their QuickBooks company files to the ASP’s data center server that might be shared among several customers. Security and down time are recurring concerns for the typical ASP business.
The Painless QuickBooks approach is very different. Your data center applications including QuickBooks are totally under your control in data centers owned by Amazon, Google, Intermedia or Microsoft. You are not an ASP, however, you own your own private cloud from which to grow and scale up your IT business. You can easily transfer this model to your clients and maintain the excellent customer service they are accustomed to.
Data Center based applications deliver well documented competitive advantages for businesses. Your clients can benefit from all of these competitive advantages.
- Eliminate costs of purchasing powerful servers that require security and skilled IT staff to be available 24/7/365
- Save money that they would typically spend on high performance workstations by utilizing consumer grade equipment
- Stop frustrating manual upgrades to individual computers by receiving upgrades performed once on a single server
- Reduce office space demands by gaining access to company applications regardless of employee’s location
- Remove backup and recovery liability with enhanced application and data backup snapshots taken at regular intervals
- Work from a smart phone, an iPad, a Windows or Android tablet with complete cross platform application compatibility
- Mitigate risk in a computing environment of rapidly changing technology and security issues
- Lower costs per transaction through economies of scale in infrastructure, people and tools
- Redeploy your time and talent to focus on your core business activities rather than complex Information Technology
We would like to help you move out in front of your competing QuickBooks hosting providers. Please contact us when you’re ready to make your move.