TheMadPeacock On The Sofa

It was probably the launch of MobileMe and a comment from a friend about how she uses it to run her business that got me thinking about this..

IT has evolved, has your business evolved with it?

More and more of the IT services a business needs to function are moving to SAAS (Software As A Service). These SAAS providers offer everything you need to run a system, the servers, the storage, the software, the IT staff for support, maintenance and upgrades.. you name it and someone probably does it.

In a recent IT overview presentation to the Exec team here at Emergent it was a surprise to myself and others that although we have traditionally hosted every part of our business internally and are culturally very security sensitive (its a competitive market) we are already relying on several SAAS solutions to manage some of our MOST critical data.

• Development is internal, it is the core of our business and we feel safer hosting it internally (for now)
• Salesforce.com is used by almost every department, we hold market data, customer information, prospect information, marketing analysis data, product documents, company documents and much more up in that particular cloud and it has been rock solid.
• We use SAAS systems for our accounting, payroll and HR systems.
• We host our own Exchange servers, a policy that has been problematic up to now with frequent and prolonged email down time. We now have all new servers and a new improved network. IT promises much better performance but part of me wonders if any 3 person IT team can deliver 99.9%+ up time to rival even basic SAAS email solutions like Google Apps? That’s less than 9 hours down time a year!
• Project management can be run through basecamp
• Intranet is available through Google Apps, ZoHo and others
• Blogs, Forums and traditional corporate web site hosting is probably the one service area most company’s already outsource and is available from thousands of vendors.

And the list goes on and on…

With “3 nines” (99.9% up time) products (like Google Apps) being seen as sub-par, “4 nines” a normal level of service to expect and some vendors now boasting “5 nines” service contracts, that 5 minutes of down time a year! can an IT team of less than 20 people possibly offer safer more reliable service?

I am interested to hear how your company gets on with SAAS, horror stories and successes.. Please post your experiences and thoughts below.