Hi, I’m Kevin Lalor, founder of Business Intelligence 101. I’ve seen a lot of new technologies come and go in my 25+ years in the technology industry. The Internet and email were the most influential, but after those, I believe cloud computing will have the next greatest impact.

Why? SaaS and cloud computing are leveling the playing field, allowing small to midsize businesses to have the same computing power once reserved for the large corporations. Our team at Bi101 experienced it first-hand, and it was so impactful, we’ve shifted our entire business model around delivering cloud apps.

I’ll use our blog to share our cloud experiences and have a conversation about what’s happening with cloud computing.

Enjoy!

Why Bi101 is Passionate About the Cloud

Bi101 is an independent software consulting firm that specializes in migrating companies to the SaaS model.  Bi101’s consultants take companies through a guided process to transition their computing to the cloud, starting with the highest ROI computing areas.

We Practice What We Preach – Bi101 Moves to SaaS in the Cloud

Bi101 has 17 years experience as an independent software consulting firm. We started in 1993 reselling AS/400 based MAPICS ERP along with hardware, peripherals and consulting services to deliver a total solution for mid-sized manufacturers.

We started to clearly understand the true client benefits of moving to the cloud in 2004 when we began reselling Postini’s email encryption and security product.

When Google announced it was purchasing Postini in 2007, we realized we could take this approach to the next level.  Instead of upgrading our own email server to Exchange 2007, we transitioned to Google Apps, initially just for email, calendaring, and chat.

Soon we began using the broader productivity suite including message discovery for archiving, document collaboration with Google Docs and external collaboration, and Google Sites for our implementation project management. It’s similar to Microsoft’s Sharepoint.

The payoff was huge:

• Users no longer needed to access the company network to do business
• There was no longer a single point of failure
• Our IT costs dropped dramatically

We quickly took the next step and moved our financial system to the cloud, abandoning Quickbooks to deploy Intacct and Paychecks Payroll.  The process continued when we moved our files from our local file server to Amazon.com’s S3 service (which only costs us $2.50 per month). The last step is to migrate to Saleforce.com for CRM and help desk ticketing.

Today our employees can access all Bi101 company resources from anywhere without any Bi101-provided infrastructure.  All employees access the applications using their own hardware.  We’re always on the latest release, we have no upgrades on the horizon, no backups to worry about and our power bill is lower.  We now have an infrastructure that is more reliable, more secure and costs us a fraction of what we were paying for our on-premise infrastructure.

Our entire business runs in the cloud 24/7. It’s powerful, and we’ll be happy to show you how you can achieve the same.

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