On Demand Microsoft EPM Can Empower Your ISV Solution

On demand Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) can help you promote, sell and deploy your solution to customers worldwide. Ride the “software + service” wave by partnering with Project Hosts to offer your customers a hosted version of your solution. Your on demand solution can shorten your sales and deployment cycle and improve customer satisfaction by removing the IT barriers that limit your sales!

On Demand Deployment Options:
Use Tours, Trials, Interim Hosting, and Long-Term Hosting to promote, sell and deploy your products faster and more effectively. Tours and Trials help close sales by allowing prospects to quickly, conveniently evaluate your solution before making a purchase decision. Interim and Long-Term Hosting allow you to cost effectively deploy your solution to customers anywhere in the world.

You can choose your revenue model when deploying your solution on demand. Collect license fees upfront or rent licenses and have us collect license fees for you on a monthly basis. We provide a branded portal with your logo and colors that enables user administration, EPM diagnostics, and usage reporting. Your branded portal can also be tailored to launch your application for users. An on demand EPM environment utilizing your product is delivered ready for configuration by you or your sales partner within 5 to 10 business days.

• Tours
  Prospective customers can evaluate your solution by taking an online EPM Tour featuring your product early in the sales process. Our registration and lead management system collects visitor information and notifies you when someone registers for your Tour. You can generate sales leads by making your custom Tour available on the EPMConnect.com worldwide community web site, if your organization is an EPMConnect program member. You can also drive prospects to your Tour from your web site or other promotional channels.
• Trials
  An on demand Trial allows prospective customers to try your solution for 30 to 60 days before committing to a purchase. Trials are deployed in 5 business days so prospective customer can move rapidly from the awareness to the evaluation phase of the sales process. Customers can convert to ongoing hosting at the end of the Trial.
• Interim Hosting
  If your customer’s IT department is not ready to deploy EPM in-house, they can deploy on demand EPM using month-to-month Interim Hosting, then migrate onsite once they are ready to deploy internally. Customers often report that deploying on demand EPM saves two months or more versus the time required by their internal IT department. Rapid deployment can significantly reduce the time between when you close a sale and when you get paid! Long-Term Hosting Long-Term Microsoft EPM Hosting can be a cost effective alternative to onsite deployment. It can result in lower costs and much higher up-time than onsite deployment for your customer, depending on the capabilities of their IT department. Long-Term Hosting environments are highly scalable and can easily increase capacity to meet the needs of your customer. Long-Term Hosting can allow you to sell your solution to companies that are unable to deploy your solution due to IT constraints, increasing the number of your potential customers!
• Shared or Dedicated Servers
  We create a dedicated pod of application and SQL servers for each on demand ISV solution. Your solution and configurations are pre-loaded so you can quickly deploy an environment when you sign a new customer. Trials, Interim Hosting, and Long-Term Hosting solutions can be deployed on shared or dedicated servers within your pod. Dedicated servers host an EPM environment for a single customer which provides maximum flexibility but at a higher cost than a shared server. There are no restrictions on application customization because no other customers share the applications. A dedicated server is required if your software is not designed for multi-tenant use or your customer has a large user base and needs a dedicated server for optimal performance. Shared servers can be a cost effective means to deploy your solution if it is multi-tenant. A single server is configured to support multiple environments, one for each customer sharing the server. Shared server environments can be fast to deploy and less expensive than dedicated servers but there may be restrictions on application customizations to individual environments.

Software Updates & Support:
Deploying your product on demand greatly simplifies software updates. We simply deploy your update on all the servers hosting your solution. Hotfixes and application updates for your product can be deployed on a defined schedule to ensure users always have the current version of your software. Microsoft EPM service packs and hotfixes are updated periodically on shared server deployments. We schedule software updates at the convenience of customers deployed on dedicated servers.

Having your solution deployed on our servers also improves the responsiveness and effectiveness of your support. We provide you with admin access to your on demand servers so it is much easier to perform service and support than trying to access the onsite server for one of your customers.

Data Security & Backup:
We use multiple levels of security and both onsite and offsite backup to protect customer data.

• Data Security
  Project Hosts protect your customers’ data using seven levels of security in our SAS 70 certified, FISMA compliant data centers:
  • Physical security: All servers are located in a tier-1 NaviSite data center with 24x7, guard-controlled access. Identification protocols and biometric scanners authenticate technicians before permitting entry into the data center. Access is strictly limited to personnel that need to work on servers or infrastructure.
  • Transport security: All communication between user PCs and their hosted environment is through SSL or RDP. Both protocols employ 128-bit encryption.
  • Firewall security: All ports into and out of the data center are blocked except for the few ports necessary to provide application access. Intrusion detection is also in use.
  • Windows security: Project Hosts employs the strictest possible Windows lock-down techniques. Users only have access to the functions required for operation of their EPM solution and are securely separated from all other users in the data center. All servers run Windows 2003 and applicable security patches are applied promptly.
  • Data security: Databases are completely isolated, strong passwords are required, and access is strictly limited. Optional dedicated SQL servers take this one step further by completely isolating the data for each organization.
  • Password security: Strong passwords are required for all deployments. Passwords consist of combinations of upper and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers and are extremely effective in preventing unauthorized access.
  • Virus security: McAfee Virus software is employed and kept continually up to date to ensure a clean, safe environment.
  All security systems are regularly monitored and tested for vulnerability and undergo an annual third-party security audit. New potential threats are addressed 24x7 by our Network Operations Center (NOC).
• Data Backup
  We provide two data backup options at different price points to protect against accidental data loss due to user error or data loss due to a disaster.
  
  The Standard Project Hosts backup service includes:
  • Database log file backups every 4 hours kept on a separate server in the data center for 3 days
  • Nightly full database backups kept onsite for 30 days and duplicated and moved offsite for 90 days
  The High Volume Project Hosts data backup service includes:
  • Database log files backups every 4 hours kept on a separate server in the data center for 3 days
  • Full database backups nightly which are kept onsite for 14 days
  • Weekly backups stored offsite for 4 weeks
  • Monthly backups stored offsite for 12 months

Onsite Managed Deployment:
If a customer wants to deploy your solution onsite but lacks IT expertise or capacity, Project Hosts provides Onsite Managed Deployment services. We can deliver the Microsoft EPM Solution installed on the required servers, ready to be cabled into a customer network. We remotely monitor the servers, operating system, databases and applications, allowing us to remotely manage, maintain, upgrade, backup, and support the your solution.

Contact Us:
Project Hosts has deployed on demand Microsoft EPM solutions for hundreds of organizations worldwide since 2003 and we have powered product tours for tens of thousands of potential users.

On demand Microsoft EPM can empower your solution and increase your sales and simplify your deployment process. Contact us by email or (800) 507-2819 now to learn more!