Hosting Raisers and Financial Edge with Blackbaud will likely prove
advantageous. I have worked with several education non-profits who
have either started with hosting these apps or have migrated to
hosting from premise-based deployments. You already note some of the
reasons but another that might turn the tide is better customer
support. One of the orgs I deal with hosted both products internally
and there was often a noticeable delay in support response. When the
products are hosted on servers that Blackbaud controls, the consensus
is that the support is a bit more timely and effective.
This does come with some risks (as does any hosted solution).
Internet connectivity is critical (both at your site and Blackbaud).
Outages do happen so you should set the expectations with the user
community. I would also recommend considering a redundant Internet
connection at your site, especially for access to hosted mission
critical applications. Even something as minimal as a ADSL connection
(properly configured) could give users access to mission critical
systems in the event of a prolonged Internet outage on your primary
circuit.
And just a general comment to anyone considering hosting applications.
Hosting and so-called "cloud computing" continues to gain moment,
mainly because many large providers have excess capacity they want to
turn into revenue sources. In general, the case for hosting is
substantial but I would encourage people to look at the following when
going down this road:
1. Service Level Agreements (SLA): Understand what the hosting
provider guarantees in terms of system uptime and availability and be
sure to understand your organizations rights under the SLA.
2. What's included: Be sure to understand what is included with your
hosting. That includes software and hardware support, backups and
software licensing. With someone like Blackbaud, you are still paying
for SQL but probably under a completely different licensing model for
Software as a Service providers (so-called Software Provider Licensing
Agreements or SPLA). But be sure to understand what you can do with
that licensing (such as hosting other mission critical databases if
the opportunity presents itself).
3. Bandwidth: The more you host, the more critical Internet
connectivity becomes. Redundancy becomes increasingly important as
well as the technologies needed to automatically fail over to a
secondary connection (and potentially limit traffic on that secondary
connection for mission critical purposes). I dare say that in the
coming years, the emphasis on systems engineers will be replaced with
communications engineers...and the good one's ain't cheap (NB: My
prognostications have, at times, been as reliable as a certain
groundhog in Pittsburgh so fair warning :-)
I have often seen people concentrate on the hosting costs in these
scenarios and not the total costs of hosting, bandwidth, downtime,
etc. In my experience, hosting is very much a cost effective option
but can be more so when you consider all of the real and opportunity
costs involved.
Just my two cents.
TJ
IT Consultant
Adjunct Professor
Department of History
Mount Saint Mary's University
On 5/11/09, Dayton, Jeff <JDayton@madeira.org> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Well we have finally managed to upgrade our outdated T-1 to a 20MB fiber
> connection and I am able to give some serious thought to off-site
> hosting of some of our platforms.
> I have begun talks with Blackbaud concerning off-site Raiser's Edge and
> Financial Edge hosting. My offices are very excited about the prospect
> of working
> from home and I'm excited about having a couple less servers to maintain
> and losing the expense of the SQL licenses.
>
> Has anyone out there attempted this endeavor? I would love to hear
> about anyone's experience with this.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> Jeff Dayton
> Director of Technology
> The Madeira School
> 703-556-8342
> jdayton@madeira.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Sent from my mobile device
TJ Rainsford
E: tjrainsford@gmail.com
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