"In-House Out-House" – pain, IT Consultants, migrations and TCO!

Consider this view of "when hosting goes bad" (annotated from SMB Thoughts by Brian Williams and I’ve clarified the odd point)

A ten user environment gets the advice from another solution provider, or kid, that a simple Microsoft Small Business Server with Hosted Exchange services is the perfect solution for their office. So the solution is implemented and for the first 3 months everything is working great; file sharing, automated backup, shadow copy, remote access, mobile sync…you know all the stuff that makes a business tick. Then out of the blue, the Hosted Exchange provider has an outage, the outage lasts a day and a half. OK, no problem just happened once, then a week later another outage, now the client is not happy we need to find another provider. We now get the call and are asked to step in as their new trusted advisor, I now have to give them the bad news.

·         All those shared calendars you have established, those are going to break.   They will need to be shared out again.

·         All those public folders you setup, those will need to be re-established along with permissions. We’ll need to export those public folders to .PST and re-import.

·         You use the auto-complete function in Outlook as your address book/contact list…that’s a fantastic Office feature, will need to migrate those .nk2 files

·         We’ll need to export all the Outlook profiles to .PST then re-import under the new provider

·         We’ll need to resetup Mobile phone sync, best to wipe the phone and start clean.    Just need to change the ActiveSync settings

·         As you can see while SaaS has some great benefits it can quickly turn ugly. The above example was just Hosted Exchange I can’t even imagine the CRM migration process.

So if you begin offering SaaS you better inform your client of the migration or exit strategy if they decide later they don’t like the solution or decide to move to an in-house solution.

This is an interesting post and provokes some discussion.  Clearly Brian is someone who’s picked up the pieces more than once!   The real cause of this issue is not the incorrect choice of solution for a critical function, but the quality of the solution you choose.   Of course, you can move to a disastrously unreliable in-house solution too!

He’s a US IT provider and I think this issue is becoming more common in the US with online services and the lowering cost, more competitive market and new entrants.  The entry of new, small, poorly financed and /or inexperienced service providers into the hosting market is becoming an issue and may be starting to damage the name of the industry too.   Clearly we don’t want this to become too much of an issue – even Microsoft need to be careful that their entrance into the market with Microsoft Online Services has a positive benefit for all, and they are working very hard with their partners to ensure this.

So, how do you chose a provider that doesn’t have multiple 1-day+ outages?

Look for experience & track record, scalability and resilience, accreditations and partnerships, inspect the hardware and storage vendors they use, look their company history and finances. It’s also worth bearing in mind that a service provider who’s core business is hosting will be more committed to service delivery that one who’s core business lies elsewhere.

As the hosting market matures even more, the reliability of the supplier (or even the internal systems) will improve on average all round. So the difference between good and bad hosters in terms of reliability will reduce.

Of the problems on the original post above, I believe these can be similar or worse with an in-house solution further down the line. The “bad news” Brian has to give the client is actually just time and money to them – they are paying the IT consultant to fix the issue, they aren’t actually importing their public folders or sync’ing the address book themselves!

Here the client is just spending $$$ on the migration away from a hosted solution – have they considered the TCO of in-house solution… will they spend this much again every few months/years applying Service Packs, upgrading to Exchange 12, buying more licenses, upgrading storage or performance, or installing an archive solution. A bit of pain migrating in/out between service providers isn’t that bad really, it’s not like you’re doing this every 6 months – our average customer lifetime is ~3-years and increases every month.

With Exchange and CRM – the solution isn’t to have an easy in/easy-out process, it’s to find a reliable, robust and resilient solution which balances the total costs and provides the right level of service for your business.   Find this, either in-house, from a service provider, or from Microsoft Online, and you’ve got a trusted solution for life!

thanks, Dan