This article originally appeared online here, and in KM World's June 2013 issue Volume 22, Issue 6] By Phil Britt, KM World, May 28, 2013
Companies are increasingly going to the cloud to take advantage of superior uptime, faster integration of remote information with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and more sales opportunities.
DPR Group, a public relations and marketing firm, had used a couple of different technology support systems since 1998, starting with an individual technician, then advancing to a managed services company. But with each of those solutions came too much downtime, says Dan Demaree, DPR Group president and CEO. Although the provider promised technical resolutions within a few hours, sometimes it took a day or more-far too much delay for DPR Group to continue to meet the needs of its growing customer base. So Demaree started exploring other options in mid-2011. He learned about Cetrom Information Technology, and started using the company's cloud computing solution in November 2011.
"It's the best decision I ever made," Demaree says. With the Cetrom cloud computing solution, he and his staff can log in from anywhere and be in the cloud, using hosted applications and benefitting from the speed of working in the cloud. With the managed services vendor, the application was hosted on the DPR Group's own server and latency issues arose in the communications between the systems of the DPR Group and the provider. Users would log in, start typing and experience a lag of several seconds before the keystrokes would be recorded. That would be especially confusing when they were working on documents, spreadsheets, etc., because it was difficult to know if what was showing up on the screen was just slow or if an entry had yet to be made. With Cetrom, however, once users log in, there are no latency issues.
Because Cetrom hosts the applications as well, all the data is in a central location, rather than in separate silos on the Cetrom and DPR Group systems. The information is automatically replicated in real time on the DPR Group system through the Cetrom Hybrid Cloud, so users can access data in the event of an outage. Perhaps the greatest advantage that Cetrom offers, according to Demaree, is that trouble tickets are addressed quickly. "Ever since we've had Cetrom, there has never been an issue with downtime. The old company was down all of the time," Demaree says. "After using this for a while, I can't imagine going back to what we had before." (Full article PDF: 2013-05-28 KM World)