Tag Archives: Managed
SuiteBilling Simplifies Complex Billing for Managed WiFi Services Provider
.jpg "SuiteBilling Simplifies Complex Billing for Managed WiFi Services Provider")
Posted by Barney Beal, Content Director
For Datavalet, a Canadian WiFi managed services provider, billing a customer can be a complicated endeavor. Managing WiFi services for hotels, restaurant chains and the like means customers vary widely.
“McDonald’s has more than 1,500 restaurants in Canada, and every one has a subscription,” said Jean-Claude Homet, vice president of finance for Datavalet. “I need to make sure I have the proper number every month. On the other end [of the spectrum] I have a single hotel or a chain with two dozen sites.”
A combination of growth, demand for greater visibility into operations and the frustration of finance led Datavalet on a journey to solve not just its billing challenges but to replace an outdated accounting system.
Spun off from Nortel in 1998 as a company that provided wired internet services to the hotel business, Datavalet’s growth took off as WiFi emerged. It now serves managed WiFi solutions to large enterprises, restaurants, banks, insurances, hospitals, airports, hotels and school campuses. Its services span installation, network and infrastructure management, and it has become the leading managed WiFi provider in North America with 10,000 client locations.
For years, managing billing at Datavalet was done manually with spreadsheets, forcing finance staff to carefully check to make sure nothing was missed. But when new investors acquired the company in 2017, they wanted greater visibility into operations. Datavalet tried to reconfigure its existing Acomba accounting system to meet its requirements but when that failed to meet expectations leadership realized they would need new software.
The company looked at Sage Intacct, SAP Business One and Microsoft Dynamics before ultimately choosing NetSuite.
“Subscription billing, consolidation, ease of access, out of the box reporting—no one did all of those things as well as NetSuite,” Homet said.
NetSuite didn’t just address the company’s accounting issues, it was able to solve its billing problems as well. NetSuite’s unified billing framework supports transaction, subscription, usage-based and hybrid models, all while managing revenue accurately and in accordance with the latest revenue recognition standards. While importing and setting up the roughly 200 subscription accounts Datavalet was managing took some work, once it was in NetSuite the results were impressive.
“As soon as July hit we were amazed how fast we were done with our billing,” Homet said. “By July 10 we were done and everyone was wondering, ‘what do we do now?’”
Indeed, the entire implementation took just four months using the SuiteSuccess methodology and NetSuite Professional Services, and it now has a unified platform for managing financials, its US subsidiary thanks to multi-subsidiary management with NetSuite OneWorld, and its complex billing scenarios with SuiteBilling. Billing has been simplified significantly.
“SuiteSuccess made a huge difference,” Homet said. “It’s their team, their product, that’s what they do day in and day out. To have a team dedicated to SaaS, made a huge difference to us. We really dealt with people who know what they’re doing.”
Datavalet was so pleased with the initial implementation, it quickly decided to add NetSuite Professional Services Automation (PSA) software for managing professional services. Datavalet had tried using a highly customized version of SugarCRM to manage its deployment department, but eventually gave that up and tracked resources manually.
“PSA will allow us to better integrate the deployment department into accounting,” Homet said. “It’s going to help us calculate cost of goods sold, deployments and internal labor costs. It’s also going to be easier to manage when we deploy a new customer with hundreds of locations.”
Datavalet is looking to double its annual growth of around 15 to 20%, as it expands into the US with a new partnership with AT&T. NetSuite OneWorld will allow it to continue to add and easily consolidated subsidiaries.
Learn more about NetSuite SuiteBilling.
by NetSuite filed under
How Duolingo Successfully Managed Complex International Growth and Doubled Revenue
How Duolingo Successfully Managed Complex International Growth and Doubled Revenue
Posted by Kendall Fisher, Executive Producer and Host of The NetSuite Podcast
Duolingo is the language-learning platform that’s currently teaching 91 courses across 30 distinct languages to more than 300 million users…all over the world. In fact, it’s the most downloaded education app on iOS and Android.
Since its launch in 2012, Duolingo has set out with one mission: To make language education accessible to everyone. And it’s most certainly on the right path according to those statistics above.
However, high growth comes with high pain points, and Duolingo is no exception to that rule.
On this episode of “The NetSuite Podcast,” we sat down with Senior Accounting Manager, Amanda Strader, who dives into some of the challenges Duolingo faced as it took on international expansion while simultaneously growing internal headcount.
Strader says the company needed a way to manage multiple currencies and subsidiaries while controlling access for various roles. As one of the few people on the accounting side, she also needed a way to manage revenue—which would double in just a few years—and automate processes as the company scaled from 10 people to 200 people across three different offices.
Tune into this episode of “The NetSuite Podcast” to find out why Duolingo implemented NetSuite to overcome its challenges and how that decision has benefited the company as it continues to experience massive growth. Listen in on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube.
by NetSuite filed under
Should I Add a Managed Services Offering for My Services Business?
I recently sat down with Adam Mayo, NetSuite Industry Principal for Services, to discuss the risks and benefits of adding a new revenue stream – specifically a new managed service revenue stream – to your business.
Evan Heby: What are some of the growth trends for the professional services industry in 2019?
Adam Mayo: A growing trend amongst Professional Services organizations is diversifying their business by including multiple offerings to their client base. In particular, Managed Services has been a focus of these organizations to provide high quality value to their customers as well as a recurring revenue stream not available from a traditional services model. These organizations have a vision for future growth while realizing the challenges with opening a completely new delivery model. Many firms are asking not only if they are ready, but if they are equipped to grow the business in this way.
Heby: Why are firms moving towards a managed services model? Can you give insight into the differences / benefits between a traditional model vs. a managed services model?
Mayo: Traditional consulting organizations typically bill customers on a contract basis such as Fixed Fee or Time and Materials for services delivered in the form of a project. They quote a project, sign the contract, deliver the work and get paid. A services organization selling products and services such as an IT value-added reseller follow a similar model for services. They may resell products receiving a margin on the sale and provide complimentary services to the products sold. Additional revenue from the client relies entirely on selling new products or project work. The question they are asking; how can we achieve a more recurring source of revenue?
Heby: It sounds like, the biggest gap services businesses are trying to close is to increase recurring revenue. You spoke briefly about IT VARs in your last answer, can you talk about how their models are changing?
Mayo: As I mentioned earlier, businesses such as IT VARs traditionally resell products and services. They are now building out their teams and capabilities to build a more complete offering for their customers. Not only are they reselling network equipment and the service to install it, they will offer to maintain the network as a managed service maintenance contract. Their customer pays a recurring fee to get a higher value service of network maintenance that the customer cannot provide themselves. The IT VAR now has a consistent revenue stream with a recurring contract that will extend for months and years.
Heby: What about other types of services organizations aside from IT VARs – like traditional consulting firms?
Mayo: Beyond IT VARs, traditional consulting organizations are looking to provide their own managed service offerings. How does a company typically focusing on project work turn that into a recurring model? Like VARs, consulting organizations have also focused on a high value offering to their customers: On-demand services and support. These offerings allow the customer to have a direct line to consultants and support staff for any issues they may encounter. That on-demand access is worth the premium to the end customer to get ahead of the line when issues may arise on a project or product being supported by the consulting organization.
Heby: How do businesses hoping to increase their recurring revenue make the transition to managed services?
Mayo: As these services organizations look to grow the business with managed services they are realizing the complexities associated with supporting the new model. Often, they are hiring dedicated sales, delivery and support staff to provide the new offering. Systems must be in place to handle business operations complexity such as sales processing, recurring billing and appropriate revenue recognition. An IT services firm may create a Network Operations Center (NOC) with dedicated space, equipment and resources to deliver real-time monitoring and support. The value is there for services businesses to offer Managed Services. However, a well thought out sales and delivery model must be built or acquired to ensure success.
by NetSuite filed under
Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement – Using Clone Solution to remove Managed Solution component(s)
Hey all-
You might have read some historical posts by me on my personal blog site here and team blog site here. Now I am part of Dynamics 365 PFE team focused on Customer Engagement. Here is my first post on CRM PFE Team blog site 🙂
Clone Solution feature has been around for a little while. However, I came across several customer questions around Clone Solution action and removal of managed component(s), entities or entity assets. For customers already familiar with Solution and Customizations, I created this guided lab showcasing simple example of Managed Component removal using Clone Solution and explains “Stage for Upgrade”. Presuming familiarity with Solutions and Customizations, this is not a full scale click by click lab document. For simplicity Dev and Test instances are Source and Target orgs, respectively.
In Dev Instance:
Create a New publisher named Contoso Consulting. Set prefix to CC
Create a new solution, named Providers. Set publisher to Contoso Consulting, version to 1.0
Under Providers solution,
- Create a new entity named Provider with fields Name, Website, email address, work phone, fax and show it under Sales.
- Create Agent entity under Providers solution with fields Name, email address, phone, fax, DOB and show it under Sales
- Add Sitemap under client extension section
- Export Providers solution as managed
In Test Instance:
Import Providers 1.0 solution.
Now switch back to Dev Instance:
Create 2.0 version of Providers solution by Cloning it
In cloned Providers v2.0 solution,
- Remove DOB field from Agent entity
- Remove Provider entity
- Export Providers 2.0 solution as managed
In Test Instance:
- Import Providers 2.0 solution.
Note: The “Stage for upgrade” check box on Import Options dialog allows separation of Solution Import and merging of both versions. It is checked and grayed out when there are Patches of same Solution in target instance. System enforces “Stage for upgrade” in such a scenario.
- If there are no Patches of same solution in target system, “Stage for upgrade” is optional. When “Stage for upgrade” is selected (either by System or manual), Apply Solution upgrade action must be performed manually after the import. Apply Solution upgrade action is automatically executed as part of the Solution Import if “Stage for upgrade” is left unchecked.
- If “Stage for upgrade” was selected, then Apply Solution upgrade when import is complete. Solution Import completion dialog offers this action, or it’s available on Solutions grid. This action is applicable for the previous version and not the recently imported(staged) _Upgrade solution, refer below screenshots.
Note: Behind the scenes the “Applying Solution Upgrade” action takes care of merging both version and retains only latest version, Providers 2.0 in above example. Post Apply upgrade, one can examine Providers 2.0 Solution for components removed.
Maintain or override customization doesn’t apply to removed component so one can chose depending on potential unmanaged changes in target org.
Hope this helps!
What IT Pros Need to Know (and Forget) About Managed Services
If you’ve ever walked into a grocery store, you’ve probably seen employees stock shelves. What you may not know is that, in many cases, the people stocking those shelves aren’t employed by the grocery store, but rather by the vendor whose products they are stocking. And it makes sense: companies would sooner trust their own employees to handle their products properly than a busy and sometimes understaffed supermarket. This is how Terry Plath, Syncsorts’ Senior Vice President of Support and Services, sees managed services.
“People whose focus is on a particular solution, like HA/DR, really know it inside out,” says Plath. And that knowledge is the basis for Syncsorts’ managed services offering. Customers who use MIMIX® Availability or iTERA® Availability can trust Syncsort to handle the day-to-day management of their HA/DR environments. This takes stress off in-house staff while making sure the environment stays available and switch-ready. Customers can choose pre-packaged tiered options with additional a la carte features to personalize their experience, but one common element in managed services, according to Plath, is the knowledge of industry experts.
“We have a wide pool of experts with enough experience that there are no surprises in HA/DR anymore. They’ve seen it all.”
There are many managed services providers available, and picking the right one shouldn’t be left to chance. Plath provided four key tips for finding the provider that will work best with you:
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Look for specialists
“As companies are looking to hand work off, you want to look for people who have the experience in the area you want,” says Plath, “A hosting service may not manage an HA/DR environment and even an HA/DR provider may not service your specific solution.” Plath advises customers to understand the difference between the level of service provided by an HA managed services provider like Syncsort and a general cloud or hosting provider in order to confirm whomever is managing your HA solution is giving you exactly what you need–not too much or too little.
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Have a thorough service level agreement
Clients should make clear the exact expectations of their managed services offering. Plath even encourages SLAs include penalties for under-performance. When an entire IT environment is on the line, there is no room for guesswork or surprises.
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Ensure a training and certification program is in place
The greatest benefit of using a managed services provider is access to often decades of industry expertise. And the best way of ensuring you get the proper expertise is by confirming that your service provide uses formal training and certification to find the best talent to manage your environment.
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Make sure there isn’t a lot of turnover
The relationship your company forms with a managed services provider should last for years. So it’s best to avoid providers that suffer a great deal of shakeup within its ranks. Consistency in staff is the most direct path to consistency in IT management. And Terry Plath recommends the best way to see if your provider has a turnover problem is just to ask. Directness and openness will ensure that your professional relationship starts off on the right foot.
There are also misconceptions about managed services Mr. Plath would like to dispel. Chief among them is the fear that managed services is a way for companies to reduce jobs and outsource in-house labor. He notes that many of Syncsorts’ managed services customers are actually companies that need additional help performing critical tasks for their HA/DR environments.
“They have system administrators who are stretched way too thin. Their servers may not be ready for failover because HA/DR is only, say, 1/16 of their job–and sometimes that’s being generous.” More and more businesses are waking up to the fact that leanness can reach a point of diminishing returns. Insufficient staffing can occasionally lead to mistakes and long-term risk of disaster. Syncsort Managed Services looks to bridge that gap, offering a simple answer that keeps everyone on-task and satisfied.
“The fact of the matter is managed services is not going to take anyone’s job,” says Plath, “I actually look at this as job security because you know there will be no surprises with your HA solution.”
Make sure to download our whitepaper for even more on what managed services has to offer.
Public Preview: Azure SQL Database – Managed Instance Management Pack
We are happy to announce the public preview release of System Center Management Pack for Azure SQL Database – Managed Instance! This is a brand new MP to monitor the new Azure SQL Database – Managed Instance. We are looking forward to getting your feedback on the preview. Please email us at sqlmpsfeedback@microsoft.com.
Download available:
The Management Pack (CTP) for Microsoft Azure SQL Database – Managed Instance enables you to monitor the availability and performance of your Managed Instances.
Note: This Management Pack is neither part of Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Microsoft Azure nor Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Microsoft Azure SQL Database. This management pack provides monitoring, which is quite similar to monitoring of on-premises SQL Server 2017 provided by the Microsoft System Center Management Pack for SQL Server 2017+.
Note: This CTP release covers only a subset of monitors and rules. It does not offer low-privilege monitoring configuration. We will work towards the full functionality as we release new CTPs.
Feature Summary
After configuration, the Microsoft Azure SQL Database – Managed Instance Management Pack (Community Technology Preview) offers the following functional capabilities:
- User-friendly wizard to discover Managed Instances
- Support for Multiple Managed Instances
- Monitoring of Managed Instance health and performance
- Managed Instance availability and performance
- Managed Instance Health Status
- Managed Instance Securables Configuration
- CPU Consumption
- Average Wait Time
- SQL Re-Compilation
- User Connections
- HTTP Storage Performance
- Memory-Optimized Data Transactions Performance
- and others
- Database availability and performance
- Database Status
- Database Configuration
- Database Performance
- Memory-Optimized Data Filegroups Configuration
- Memory-Optimized Data Filegroups Performance
- Resource Pool Performance
- Managed Instance availability and performance
Managed Instance will show up as first level folder under Monitoring on your SCOM console.
Managed HA/DR Services Add a Wealth of Value
Vision Solutions, which recently merged with Syncsort, has been in the business of high availability and disaster recovery for more than two decades. The article below about the value of HA/DR managed services originally appeared on their blog.
Attempting to manage all of your HA/DR needs in-house is admirable, but so is understanding the need for specialized help. According to the 2017 State of Resilience Report, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS/RaaS) revenue is projected to grow dramatically over the next three years as more and more businesses are seeing its value.
How Managed HA/DR Services Add Value
Delegating the routine upkeep of your HA/DR infrastructure to a managed service provider not only frees IT staff for more sophisticated challenges, it actually saves money down the line in maintenance costs and lost productivity due to downtime. But beside the obvious time and money advantages managed services boast, here are four specific benefits your organization will enjoy:
1. The Latest and Greatest
Managed services providers are responsible for updating your environment whenever application or system changes happen. That means you will always be running the best versions of your IT tools. Even a simple software update can be all it takes to get a leg up on the competition.
2. You Will Get the Memo
When a company does nothing but monitor your HA/DR environment, they can provide status and error reports featuring details you never realized were important. You can extract a great deal of value just through a fresh perspective from an objective source.
3. An Apple a Day
Daily, preventative maintenance of your IT environment is a cornerstone of managed services. Even when the inevitable unplanned outage happens, having a managed services infrastructure in place allows you to reduce downtime and continue meeting your high service standards.
4. Freedom to be Selfish
The right partner will put in the effort to understand your specific environment and configure their service in a way that works best for you and your team. You can even choose from a number of packages to ensure you’re not wasting money on services you don’t need.
Of course, this only scratches the surface of what managed services can do for your organization. Vision Solutions offers Managed Services to handle all of the monitoring, optimization, software updates and testing of your Vision HA/DR solutions so that staff can focus on other IT priorities. Download our free 2017 State of Resilience report to review the latest trends in HA/DR planning.
Managed Resilience Services Open up Possibilities for a Large Company
Vision Solutions, who recently merged with Syncsort, has been in the business of high availability and disaster recovery for more than two decades. The article below is an update to their popular 2016 blog post summarizing how managed resilience services at a large organization made a big difference in realizing the benefits of disaster recovery readiness.
Managed Services for High Availability & Disaster Recovery
Managed Services from Vision Solutions help businesses of all sizes meet their High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) needs and accomplish far more than they could with only in-house staff. One large multinational food company did not realize the true potential of their HA/DR environment until they started using managed services. (Read also: Planned or Unplanned, All Downtime is Bad)
The organization had been using Vision Solution’s HA/DR tools since 2000, but managing their own environment. It was only after a conversation with a Vision representative in 2012 that the company realized just how much they were struggling to keep up with high HA/DR demands and how managed services could solve that problem.
“Vision Solutions Managed Services has been like adding a dedicated employee to our MIMIX task,” said a spokesperson for the company. After service personnel presented the company with options, the management team chose one and Vision Solutions was on their way.
“[Installation] was as easy as getting consultants to their systems. We got started right away,” said Lee Walkky, Director of Professional Services at Vision solutions.
In the time the company has used Vision Solutions Managed Resilience Services, it has remained consistently impressed with such aspects as the consistency, competency and responsiveness of the service. And, when it installed MIMIX into one of their overseas locations without the luxury of training or time for onboarding, they leaned on managed services to narrow the skills gap.
“We enjoy the confidence in our MIMIX replication because of the managed services,” said the spokesperson, “The weekly reports and scheduled meetings provide a huge protection to our company’s iSeries operation.”
Just like this large enterprise food company, smaller and medium size businesses can also take advantage of personalized services. “I think all customers can learn from the success [the food company] has had,” said Walkky, “They have experts taking care of [their environment] who will be there whey than need it and it frees up resources for other high priority projects.”
Currently, the company has developed a regular, consistent plan in using managed services. It has also developed the confidence they had ever since the first installation to the point where the mere presence of managed services provides peace of mind. “We now schedule switches without any concern at all,” said the spokesperson, “We feel protected.”
Managed Resilience Services Adds Security
Vision Solutions recently announced the availability of its expanded managed resilience offering to include managed security services to monitor Enforcive IT security products. The latest offering builds upon the existing managed HA/DR offerings, including day-to-day management of MIMIX, iTERA, OMS/ODS and Enforcive environments to ensure systems remain protected and available.
Vision Solutions carefully studies the causes and effects of planned and unplanned downtime and releases an annual comprehensive survey report that reflects what’s really going on with the state of HA/DR in business. Download their free 2017 State of Resilience report to review the latest findings.
3 Things you need to Know before Uninstalling a Managed Solution in Dynamics 365
Ever wondered how to remove a managed solution from a CRM environment and what the best practices are when doing so? In this blog, we will review the top three things you need to know before uninstalling a managed solution from your CRM environment.
Aside from the default out-of-the-box and pre-deployment customization solutions, Dynamics 365 supports both managed and unmanaged solutions. An unmanaged solution allows for edits and updates to any component of the solution. A managed solution is a definitive solution that can be installed and distributed in multiple environments but cannot be customized.
1.) The first and most important thing to remember before uninstalling a managed solution is that it’s permanent. Uninstalling a managed solution will delete all data that is stored in CRM, including all components defined within a solution. There is no control Z option here folks! Once you’ve done this, the data CANNOT be recovered. Only uninstall solutions that you are positive you won’t need.
2.) If your managed solution is part of a monthly subscription, like one of our PowerPack Add-ons, make sure to unsubscribe from the solution first. Unsubscribing from a solution simply stops future payments but does not uninstall the solution or delete data in your CRM. We recommend that if you have data from the solution, you unsubscribe from the service and not uninstall the solution.
3.) Installing and uninstalling managed solutions is specific to each CRM environment. What does this mean to you? If you have any questions or issues installing or uninstalling a solution, Microsoft will be able to support you. You can find instructions how to uninstall a solution in this Microsoft article.
If you need additional assistance removing a managed solution, you can work with PowerObjects’ awesome support team or reach out to Microsoft directly.
Happy CRM’ing!