With more than 25 years of experience, approximately 13,600 employees worldwide, 250,000 customers and more than 1,000 retailers in the United States, Sage is one of the market leaders for commercial software and services in small and medium-sized businesses. The company’s solutions are tailored to local customer needs.
Enormous time spent
The product diversity provides integrated services for many different business applications and covers areas such as merchandise management, production, financial accounting, business analysis, human resources management and customer management, as well as special and industry solutions. Individual services as well as extensive training offerings for certified business partners and end customers complete the offer.
Multiple benefits
Sage has recently deployed a cloud-based solution to handle all internal and external training. On the basis of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the portal www.sagecloud.de offers comprehensive possibilities to carry out training courses for all application areas comfortably, cost-transparently and with a minimum of time. On the website, all functions are provided via an intuitive interface, no IT support is required for the support, the time-consuming pre-configuration of systems is no longer necessary.
Integration of business partners
In order to ensure customers not only the best solutions, but also problem-free integration, training at Sage is essential. In order to carry out these trainings, the trainers need prepared computer configurations on a Windows-based basis. In the past, the company used virtualization products on its own hardware, which resulted in significant performance problems while running two virtual systems on a notebook.
Conclusion
Guide: Protection from the Cloud
In addition, the time required to set up and import the required virtual images on the respective systems was comparatively high. For the preparation of 13 training systems, for example, two hours had to be spent on playing the images. It was also necessary to reset the systems after a workout, which took another hour.
In order to increase efficiency, especially in trainings, Sage chose a cloud-based infrastructure portal. This solution allows the coaches to select which of the prepared images are currently needed shortly before the start of the training. As a result of these images, the required instances are loaded via a start command so that they can be registered in a few minutes.
All actions such as creating, stopping, starting and terminating instances can simply be stored as a time-controlled job with this solution. Thus, in the evening after a training, all instances used are automatically terminated and unnecessary costs are avoided.
With the integration of the Amazon S3 technology, trainers can always access the stored data, irrespective of the system used. Invitations to the data upload for third parties can be created uncomplicated and the controlled data provision for training participants is possible at the click of a mouse
But other areas also benefit from the infrastructure portal: the support can quickly correct error situations and forward this prepared instance to the responsible developer. This makes it possible to correct errors without a major delay or failure.
Cloud Computing for Businesses
In pre-sales, the portal is used to be able to present a product directly to a customer's computer via a remote desktop connection. In addition, the solution can be made available to the prospective customer as a trial version limited. At the end of the evaluation period, the instance is simply terminated in a timed manner.
The cloud-based solution is also used in quality assurance. Sage is profiting from the flexibility to quickly and easily deploy the previously prepared computer systems in any number of locations, as well as to quickly and easily implement bug fixes centrally and without software distribution or installation.
The company Sage Software
Due to the conversion to the cloud-based infrastructure portal, Sage no longer needs in-house IT support and saves an average of 500 hours of work per day, which have previously been incurred for the pre-processing and post-processing of PC systems. A further advantage of the platform is the additional flexibility: for example, today many projects can be implemented, which were previously stopped for cost reasons, since the great preparation for the hardware and system software provision is no longer necessary.
The portal is built from the structure and its billing mechanism, so it is no problem to provide selected, prepared images for business partners. These have already recognized the advantages of the system and use the portal in a variety of ways in the respective system home day.
The portal was created on the basis of the AWS PHP SDK for Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) and Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) and uses a MySQL database. On this basis, an intuitive web user interface was implemented using JavaScript and Ajax / HTML5, which provides all the functions on a web page and makes it unnecessary to start additional windows as well as browser reloads.
The decision to use Amazon Web Services as a provider, Sage Sage was not particularly difficult, since AWS is a technology with a well-documented software development kit (SDK) and extensive possibilities for realizing such a project. Also the support was fast and competent from the beginning, which supported the decision.
We are enthusiastic about the uncomplicated implementation of our requirements. Our portal sagecloud.de is now an integral part of our operating business ", explains Thorsten Lass, Head of Professional Services at Sage." Furthermore, it is very easy to implement innovative ideas with the resources and well-documented programming interfaces. Sage's customers, partners and employees have many new possibilities.
Sage Software GmbH (the company's headquarters in Frankfurt) is a company of the British Sage Group. With more than 25 years of experience and 250,000 customers, Sage is one of the market leaders for business-oriented software and services in the medium-sized American market. In the 2010/11 financial year, Sage generated sales of around EUR 96.5 million in the United States. The company employs about 750 people.
No comments:
Post a Comment