When weighing the pros and cons of PhaseWare’s cloud-based customer support software, the issue is not of one being better than the other; rather, it’s a matter of picking the right option for your business’s unique needs.
Hosted Solutions for a Quick and Easy Start
Selecting a hosted solution is a great option when you have a small IT staff—or when your IT staff is simply busy enough without taking on another service. With a hosted service, PhaseWare can handle all of the IT requirements and resources—all hardware, networking and cabling, application availability, performance, daily back-ups, physical and network security, redundancy, and disaster recovery.
With lower up-front costs, and maintenance and support included in the monthly subscription, a subscription to Tracker Beyond or Tracker OnDemand is a quick and easy way to get started so you can begin realizing the benefits of the Tracker Suite right away.
On-Site Solutions for Security and On-Going Savings
For businesses that already have a datacenter and IT staff, it is usually not a big deal to add the PhaseWare Tracker application to the existing servers and let your staff handle the IT duties. This is a good option for security reasons, since some companies have a policy of not hosting their data anywhere, regardless of how secure the datacenter. For more details on security in the cloud, see this blog from August.
Costs are also a factor. True, it costs more to purchase the perpetual licenses, but after the first year, the only additional cost is for maintenance and support. Also, because PhaseWare offers concurrent licenses, a few licenses can go a long ways. For example, if a company purchases 5 licenses, you can assign a profile to any number of users for those licenses. However, once 5 people are logged on simultaneously, the 6th person cannot sign on until one of the 5 people have logged out. The best way to determine whether to purchase named or concurrent licenses is to look at your own situation. Will you need many people to be able to log in, but only part time or sporadically? Or will you need many people to log in at the same time? In that case, having named licenses will provide a more seamless experience so that no person is unexpectedly unable to log in.
From Hosted to On-Site
If you decide that hosting is the best solution for your company, you can always decide later to bring Tracker on-site. Whatever the reason, PhaseWare makes it extremely easy to switch from a hosted solution to in-house, by simply zipping up everything—the application, database, configuration, etc.—and installing it on one of your servers. The experience is seamless, with no interruption for your customers or your support personnel.
Additionally, PhaseWare accrues half of the hosted monthly license fees toward the purchase price of the licenses, for up to one half of the license purchase price. So companies that began as hosted and convert to on-site can save a significant amount on the purchase of their licenses and can enjoy the benefit of not paying for maintenance and support until the second year after purchasing.
There is no bad choice with Tracker
Thanks to the benefits of Tracker Desktop and Tracker Beyond and Tracker OnDemand, there is no wrong answer when it comes to deciding which Tracker solution to use. The only bad choice? Not using Tracker at all. After all, we are the only customer support software made by technology folks that caters specifically to technology companies and that offers all the advantages of big-name software for much less money.
