Application Hosting

Have you considered hosting your line of business applications?

The cost and complexity of running business applications can be a burden on any business. I.T. Departments invariably do not have the knowledge and expertise to manage these systems on a day to day basis, let alone carry out regular maintenance and health check or apply patches and software / database upgrades.

Many businesses are now realising the advantages of moving some / all of the business systems to a hosted environment:

• Hardware Costs - When hosting you avoid the costs of purchasing or leasing server hardware to run applications. Thus avoiding capital spend every few years, enabling operating costs to be spread evenly each month.
• Release internal I.T. staff to concentrate on supporting the business infrastructure and not worry about the day to day stresses of maintaining key applications.
• Security is a major consideration. Hosted Data Centres are by their very nature extremely secure environments. Can most companies match and afford that level of security to keep your systems safe and secure?
• Hardware / Operating system maintenance, keeping the servers running optimally and up to date. They are also responsible for all patches and Anti Virus updates to keep the system secure from viruses and worms.
• Redundancy. The service provider is also responsible for securing and  backing up the applications data should there be a disaster, which also saves in equipment costs and gives you an extra feeling of security knowing your applications data can be recovered.

Moving your applications to a hosted environment has distinct advantages. However, this in itself can still leave the business with the problem of maintaining the applications themselves at a technical and functional level.

At a technical level your I.T. staff may not have the knowledge of the application's architectures should it stop working or slow down. They may also not understand how to apply patches to the applications, troubleshoot issues or carry out upgrades etc. Even if they do, you have still the constant worry of experienced staff leaving the business and having to replace them with replacements who have the same level of specialist application knowledge.

Your software vendors Support Contract will usually cover supplying upgraded versions of the software and also telephone helpdesk support for malfunctions in the software. But what they may not cover you for are issues to do with your operating environment, patch application and also general maintenance such as specialist DBA Services to keep the application running in top order.

This is also true at an business process level where you may need specialist advice on how to use the functionality of the application. Your software vendor may be reluctant to assist if the issue is not related to a bug in their software.

Application Managed Service

To fill that void, XenArtis can provide an Application Managed Service (AMS) at both a technical and business functionality level. This service is intended to take away some of the day to day management issues surrounding running a line of business application.

It is a flexible service that can be adapted to suit individual client requirements.

Currently we only provide full AMS for technical and business functionality on the Infor SunSystems applications (including companion products). However, we can provide technical managed services such as DBA services and regular system health checks etc for other applications so please discuss your specific requirements with us.

For more details of this service please refer to the Application Managed Service (AMS) page on this site, contact us on +44(0)1189 001033, or alternatively send a mail to services@xenartis.com.