Why Consider Hosted Engineering Collaboration?

Whether you say “hosted”, “Application Service Provider” (“ASP”) or “Software as a Service” (“SaaS”), the concept is the same - there is a strong business case for accessing your applications over the Internet. Now that these applications have matured, companies of all sizes are signing up for the benefits of this model:

• Lower risk
• Faster deployment
• Higher user adoption without expensive training
• Shared incentives for customer success
• Higher productivity
• Faster return on investment

With Collaboration Suite, you can access software-powered services and functionality through a web browser — paying on a monthly per-user basis. The cost of the hardware and infrastructure, the right to use the software, and all hosting, maintenance, upgrades and support services are bundled into your single payment.

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ENGINEERING.com engages with customers through a trial program that allows you to “try before you buy” with minimal effort, no cost and no commitment. The services and software that you use in the trial is exactly the same as will be used in your production environment.
 
That’s not always the case when you purchase under the traditional software purchasing process. Following that approach, you may have to resort to proof-of-concepts/pilot projects, demonstrations and benchmarks to complete your investigation. When going through these activities, you are constantly on the lookout for things that only work in the demonstration environment, because those activities rarely share the same installation characteristics as your live implementations. And you only see the live implementation after you have committed to the investment. So during and after this evaluation phase, you have to commit to a substantial investment of time, computing resources and money — often many months and hundreds of thousands of dollars — before seeing any of the anticipated results.

Upon successful completion of your trial, the helpful staff at ENGINEERING.com’s support center will assist you in your live deployment through our Quick Start Program. This typically involves helping your system administrator to set up the users, and helping users set up their first projects. Some online training is available to assist users through any elements they might have missed during the trial. Because many users have already experienced Collaboration Suite in the trial, the implementation occurs in a matter of days.
 
Your live deployment is also faster than traditional software because you don’t have to spend any time setting up the hardware and operating system environments. That can be a big time saving when you consider the time spent selecting and then ordering and setting up the hardware and infrastructure components. You simply configure the users to suit your requirements. And since ENGINEERING.com delivers Collaboration Suite as a service over the Internet, there is no need to install the underlying software for each individual user in your organization We also recommend that you consider building some process templates to speed your user adoption, but again, that is a configuration rather than infrastructure task.

Unlike traditional software vendors, we only keep you as a customer if your users are successful. Considering the amount of software that is never successfully implemented, that’s quite a statement!

And the biggest obstacle to successful use of any engineering software is user adoption. That’s why Collaboration Suite has been designed with an intuitive user interface and informative portal. Our goal is to ensure that most users require very little if any training. That said, there is a lot of functionality with Collaboration Suite that users may not find on their own. We do recommend that users experience an online session with our support center as part of your Quick Start package to ensure that they have experienced the full breadth of Collaboration Suite.

Aside from training, there are other obstacles to successful deployment of traditional software. Since our business success is driven by your usage of the system, we have a big incentive to work with you to overcome those obstacles. This includes our commitment to invest in making our products as easy as possible to set up, learn and use. That means that we have to employ automated configuration and easy-to-understand user interfaces wherever possible. And we have to continually upgrade Collaboration Suite to reflect the suggestions of our customers.

In the changing global economy, your organization needs to be able to adapt and scale appropriately. As a company engages its customers and suppliers, flexible methods of bringing in outside users to collaborate is critical to meeting your business goals and ENGINEERING.com is easily administered for user management and data access.

Collaboration Suite is designed to provide a highly configurable web environment, enabling you to adapt programs and projects, templates, attributes, user roles, security, and file folder structures, etc. to suit your specific requirements for effective collaboration.

And because we are a hosted solution, you can access the data from anywhere there is Web access, providing you and your team anytime access to your project information.

Our research shows that cost is a primary reason why many customers consider looking at hosted offerings, such as Collaboration Suite. That’s a big part of the reason why our pricing is an unbeatable $0 to $100 per user per month. But you can’t compare that number to purchasing software. There are a lot of hidden “gotchas” in the deployed software model.

The professional services costs of implementing conventional enterprise software applications are often prohibitively high — typically up to four or five times the cost of acquiring the software license itself. In contrast, Collaboration Suite 5 year total costs can be several hundred thousand dollars less than deployed software purchase (see chart below). In addition, customers of traditional software packages must contend with the cost of ongoing application maintenance and support, as well as fully commit to paying for both planned upgrades and unforeseen outages. In contrast, fees for Collaboration Suite include ongoing maintenance, support, upgrades, etc.

Collaboration Suite
Total Cost per year $50,000 (sample workgroup configuration)
Includes training, services, upgrades, maintenance, etc

Software Purchase (Based on industry averages)
Software $130,000
Maintenance $13,500

Servers $20,000
Maintenance $2,000
Data Base $5,000
Backup $1,500
Storage $1,200

Training $10,000
Administrator $50,000

Total First Year $233,200
Yearly Recurring $68,200


TCO = Total Cost of Ownership
All costs are approximations

For a hosted solution like Collaboration Suite, there is no big capital expenditure. Instead, the expense of the solution is matched to the benefits that are derived, making the business case for purchase a lot easier to justify than for deployed solutions.

Additionally, ENGINEERING.com has developed a pricing model that lets you engage your suppliers at no cost for submitting quotes, or to scale to full collaborative participants. This ensures that your users are generating value and return on investment based on their usage of Collaboration Suite.