Lowering Deployment Costs of Contract Management Software
The Optimum
Monday, January 3, 2011
Posted by Kevin Potts at 5:27 AM
Can you get the deployment cost benefit of a SaaS Cloud model with the security of on premise software? Yes. Here’s how.
Despite the fanfare about SaaS (multi-tenant off premise) software, most Fortune 500 companies still choose on premise contract management software deployments. Why? For security and control. General counsels don’t like having their companies’ sales, vendor and industry agreements in the cloud. There’s too much risk of data compromise.
What’s more, it’s not clear whether data in the cloud is private, at least in the U.S. Current case-law appears to support a federal government position that any data in the cloud is in the public domain. As such this data is not subject to 4th Amendment protection. Federal agencies such as the FDA, EPA or SEC might not need a warrant to search and seize this information. Wow, that’s scary.
Our customers are no different. Most deploy their contract management system behind the firewall. However, they still want faster, lower cost deployments that cloud-based software provides. And, getting IT involved is almost always a burden.
To respond, Emptoris developed Echos, a software appliance solution that delivers a turn-key, pre-configured, tuned solution for new installations and upgrades for “behind the firewall” deployments.
That’s a mouthful. What does it mean? I’ll explain.
Before Echos, a few on premise contract management software users were struggling to get the software implemented quickly. Internal IT was focused on more pressing concerns of the CIO. To implement the contract management system behind the firewall, we would ship multiple CD’s to the IT team. They would then need to install an operating system (e.g., Red Hat Linux), a database (Oracle), a web application server (e.g., IBM Websphere or Oracle Weblogic) and finally our contract management software application.
At the end of the installation, sometimes the IT team would try to open the application but receive an error message. Something had gone wrong in the installation that IT was unable to diagnose. This required an Emptoris administrator to resolve. How frustrating was that?
With Echos, we ship on DVD our software appliances, which are pre-configured and tuned to the customer’s requirements, and the EchOS software itself. The customer’s IT team runs the virtual machine with EchOS and, with just a few clicks, the Emptoris Contract Management application is live in minutes. Do you need an upgrade? No problem. EchOS can seamlessly upgrade your application instance and validate the upgrade before releasing it for general use. Moreover, the EchOS technology provides us with the unique capability to migrate from a hosted instance to an on premise instance (i.e. “behind-the-firewall”) – typical SaaS vendors will not offer you that capability.
Our proprietary EchOS technology removes the technical challenges associated with on-premise deployments and significantly reduces Total Cost of Ownership, IT overhead, and 3rd party dependencies. Lastly, it also improves the value of application service level agreements (SLAs) through the inherent consistency and automation level that it supports.
How’s that for value?