Friday, August 27, 2010

NZCS Canterbury Presentation Slides - SaaS Tools for 21st Century Service Provides

Had a great time presenting to the audience at NZCS last night on the topic of SaaS Tools for 21st Century Service Providers - lots of great questions and knowledge about the pros and cons of taking a wholly SaaS approach to IT. Thanks for the invite, guys! For those that attended the talk, and those that didn't here are my slides.

Exciting SaaS ERP startup Letstrade moves into Beta

(I've been looking forward to writing this post for a while... ) ;-)

Exciting news from cornerstone Memia customer Letstrade International who announced the start of their beta programme starting in October. Access will be free to Xero users during the beta period.

Letstrade provides a powerful Sales, Procurement and Inventory solution for businesses of all sizes, and has been (beautifully!) designed from the ground up to meet the needs of today's complex trading operations. Take a look at the video below to see a bit more info on the product and go to http://letstrade.com to sign up. Also, take a look at Xero's blog post Be the first to try Letstrade.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Memia SaaS Standard Architecture for SMEs - from NZ$31+gst per user per year

As I said in my last post, it's been a great month here at Memia. We're starting to see the fruits of our strategy to build a critical mass of expertise in new "best of breed" SaaS solutions, and work with our customers to establish a new model of agile, responsive and radically cost-effective IT services.

When we started the business two years ago, I blogged about Memia's earliest Cloud Services IT architecture and how we were "eating our own dogfood" trying to ensure that all our IT was delivered "as a service" on demand.

Things have moved on considerably since then:
  • The choice of quality SaaS applications has increased massively, together with the ability to integrate one application with another to build joined-up solutions.
  • The performance and reliability of the internet, especially the mobile internet, has improved considerably - just for example this evening at home we had two hi-res YouTube streams coming down our suburban ADSL pipe at once without a single frame slipping: even 9 months ago this was unheard of in bandwidth-scarce NZ. (Kudos - finally - to @telecomnz for getting the engineering right).
  • Perhaps the biggest change, however, is that SaaS solutions are now more widely understood and acceptable to business owners and IT managers, together with providing the critical mass of functionality to be a compelling value proposition.
Over the last year especially we've been working towards a proven suite of integrated best of breed applications which we can run our own business on, and can recommend to our own customers while providing implementation, support and training services. The result is the collection of apps above: Memia's "21st Century IT" SaaS Standard Architecture for SMEs.

Based largely around the Google Apps and Xero core platforms, this suite of applications provides a full range of functionality required to run a large number of service and trading business processes:
  • Email, Calendar and collaboration tools
  • Office productivity: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing
  • Task management
  • Contact Management and CRM
  • Sales opportunity pipeline management
  • Support case management
  • Sales process automation
  • Time-based billing
  • Job-costing and quoting
  • Job-based workflow
  • Invoicing and accounting services
... plus plenty of other functionality and configurability.

We're also pretty excited about an upcoming customer application in the Xero ecosystem launching later this year for Inventory, Stock control, Purchasing and Sales processes - watch this space.

So, we're happy to be evangelical about how much this combination of apps works well together. But best of all, the combined pricing for all of these applications running together works out according to the table below (NZ$ ex. GST):

  • Google Apps Premier Edition
  • Xero "Large" Edition
  • CapsuleCRM
  • MinuteDock
  • Workflow Max

No of usersCost per monthAnnual costCost per user per monthCost per user per year
1 user$92$1,107$92$1,107
3 users$204$2,445$68$815
10 users$438$5,250$44$525
50 users$1,538$18,450$31$369

A full suite of business applications for NZ$31 per user per month!?!? If it sounds too good to be true then get in touch with us at Memia and we will help you run a TCO comparison with other solutions you may be evaluating: you may well be happy with the results.

New Memia Senior Associate Consultant: Rob Laidlaw

We've had a great month at Memia, starting with Rob Laidlaw joining the business as Senior Associate Consultant within the SaaS Solutions consulting practice, bringing with him website and internet marketing experience to the business.

Rob is based in Christchurch, New Zealand with over 10 years of professional I.T. experience. His career includes QA management at financial software leader Sungard Avantgard and extensive consulting in software testing, website development, and internet marketing strategies for customers throughout New Zealand. Rob will be working with customers to help them make the most of internet platforms such as Google Apps, Xero, Workflow Max and CapsuleCRM (more about this combination soon....). He enjoys working with other people in business to improve efficiencies and help drive more revenue by using 21st century internet technology.

Outside of work, Rob is the licencee and chairperson of the Moa Kids Community Early Learning Centre in Redcliffs, and enjoys kite boarding during the summer months.

Welcome to Memia, Rob!