Canterbury Earthquake - free emergency help available for businesses without email

What a weekend.

I was out in central Christchurch until 11:30pm on Friday night for my wife's birthday, and then 5 hours later the parts of town where we'd been were under a pile of rubble after Saturday morning's 7.1 richter scale earthquake. (#eqnz and #nzeq on Twitter). It was an incredible jolt and went on for nearly a minute (felt longer!) - but due to the time of day, amazingly there have been no fatalities. We have been so lucky. My kids have been progressively calming down as the severity and frequency of aftershocks have reduced steadily over the weekend. We're still getting regular jolts, but hopefully that's the worst of it over.

The Civil Defence, Police and volunteers seem to have done a superb job of managing the crisis - mayor Bob Parker in particular has been excellent in the media: competent and empathetic.
After a few hours during Saturday morning without electricity and water, normal utilities have been restored to most areas of the city and things are past the initial emergency reaction and into a second phase of damage assessment.

At Memia, we currently have no access to our offices in Cashel St due to the emergency cordon, but our team will be working online during the first few days of the week at least. Also, Tuesday is the Software Summit at the Grand Chancellor hotel - currently happening as planned, to my knowledge.

One item in particular: if there are any businesses which are without email and other IT systems due to the earthquake, we're here to help. If you need an emergency solution for your business email (eg to your team @yourdomain.co.nz), we can get email flowing again usually within hours implementing Google Apps standard edition. If we can help out just get in touch 027 344 6808 and there's no charge. (You will need access to your DNS records).

So - I'm looking forward to getting Christchurch up and running again. Hopefully the Twisted Hop is still standing as well! ;-)

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.

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 users	Cost per month	Annual cost	Cost per user per month	Cost 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!

#gonegoogle Clarus implements Google Apps and achieves ROI in 6 weeks

(8 July 2010) Clarus Ltd, Christchurch's leading IT and Business Consulting firm, recently rolled out the Google Apps suite of productivity tools to all of its staff and contractors, in a bid to significantly reduce their IT spending on email, calendaring and document sharing applications. Clarus were dissatisfied with how much they were spending to rent hosted Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Sharepoint solutions, and were looking for better reliability and, above all, better value for money solutions for their staff.

The solution came in the form of Google Apps, Google's flagship platform for business productivity and collaboration. Google Apps is a full integrated package including Business Gmail, Calendars, Documents and Spreadsheets, Shared folders, Sites (eg intranets, team sharing) and many other features. Google Apps is accessible securely and reliably across the internet needing just a standard web browser, and costs only $69+gst per user per year for the premier edition with all features enabled. Google Apps is in use in over 2 million businesses worldwide, including New Zealand Post and Tait Electronics in New Zealand.

Clarus engaged Memia Cloud Consulting, Christchurch's leading Google Apps experts to plan and implement the Google Apps migration. "The whole process took less than 3 weeks from the initial meeting" said Edwin Dando, Clarus Managing Director. "The transition from our old Email system to the new was seamless - our emails just started arriving into Business Gmail minutes after we flicked the switch. While we have had some teething issues with user training requirements for those staff who are used to traditional email and office programs, generally our team is more productive and more mobile than ever." Clarus staff and contractors now have access to their Google Apps account from wherever they are working: at a customer site or out and about on their iPhones.

According to Edwin, the whole migration to Google Apps is saving Clarus hundreds of dollars each month compared to their previous solution: "Memia did exactly what we asked them to do: the ROI of this project has been less than 6 weeks.".

For more about Clarus Ltd see their website: http://www.clarus.co.nz

For more about Google Apps, click here

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#gonegoogle: Memia helps Irelands Property Management to deploy Google Apps successfully

Memia helps Irelands to roll out Google Apps to all of their staff in weeks: see http://www.memia.com/latestnews.html