So you’re saying that some people will take their time and choose one
and stick with it for life while others will play the field, pick the
hottest youngest available model and then get tired of it and move to
something newer and flashier every few years?
*From:*Af [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *[email protected]
*Sent:* Tuesday, October 17, 2017 4:42 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Same goes for picking a wife.
*From:*Matt Hoppes
*Sent:*Tuesday, October 17, 2017 3:38 PM
*To:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:*Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
A great reason to make sure you pick the right billing platform the
first time.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 17:28, <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
It never goes smoothly.
I used to work for banks, talk about a headache when you change out
their software that manages all the customer accounts etc. They
migrated off an old dinosaur main frame to an AS-400 with all the
latest software. I think it took more than 6 months to actually get
it up and going.
I have worked for several telephone companies and all of them have
migrated software, most of them multiple times. Again, never
smooth, always pain.
Ditto for WISPS, been there, done that too. Platypus was probably
the easiest due to the IT department being very hands on through the
process.
It never goes smoothly and they can guarantee everything to work all
they want, but it will not work perfectly without elbow grease.
*From:*Nathan Anderson
*Sent:*Tuesday, October 17, 2017 3:21 PM
*To:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:*Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Didn't this thread start out with somebody complaining that their
new vendor either wasn't willing to do this or weren't doing an
effective or good job of it? Vendor on-boarding is not always an
option, or at least is not something that is guaranteed to work or
go smoothly.
-- Nathan
*From:*Af [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of
*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:15 PM
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Been through this many times in my life. Done it both ways.
Several times.
Prefer the new vendor to do onboarding for me.
You get what you pay for.
*From:*Nathan Anderson
*Sent:*Tuesday, October 17, 2017 3:11 PM
*To:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:*Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Not true. It doesn't matter what the file format of the export is:
you still have to take the time to figure out how to shoehorn data
from one schema into another. As talked about earlier, maybe you'll
get support from your new vendor with that, maybe not. There will
be mistakes made during that process, and some of it will have to be
re-done. You also have to hook the new product into all of your
authentication systems and then test that to make sure it works and
doesn't suddenly break people's connections.
Then there will be the mistakes that come from actually using the
new software that you are unfamiliar with, and/or cajoling it to do
what you need it to do and which you already knew how to do with the
old software. People will get billed wrong for a while and then
you'll have to sort out that mess as your customers bring the
billing mistakes to your attention. Some people that need to get
billed won't be...others will get double-billed. Pro-rates will get
miscalculated. The system will on-hold somebody by mistake that
shouldn't have been. And on and on.
If the software is locally hosted, you can learn a new system and
transition over to it on your own schedule, instead of being pushed
into the deep end of the pool on day 1.
-- Nathan
*From:*Af [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of
*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:04 PM
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Export backups as CSV and you can re-import it into any database.
You will only be screwed for a very short time.
*From:*Nathan Anderson
*Sent:*Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:13 PM
*To:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:*Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
I have to say that I'm partially with Matt on this one.
It's really not about access to your own data, although that can
certainly be a component depending on how things are designed. It
sounds like perhaps Sonar has no problem giving you reasonable
access to exports of your data for you to backup yourself, and for
the moment, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt on this.
I don't think I have to convince anyone how critical billing
software is to an organization. If it screws up or stops working,
you are losing money, and fast.
The SaaS model has some clear benefits to both parties (developer
and user), but it has an equal number of new downsides as well. One
big-E-on-the-eyechart one is what happens if the product is
discontinued, either because the parent company/developers go out of
business or for some other reason.
In the traditional software licensing and hosting model, where you
use your own computing resources to execute the code, if the
development company goes out of business one day, the software that
you still possess a copy of does not suddenly become less useful to
you. Sure, you won't get future upgrades and fixes to the product
from the vendor, but at least you have some time to figure out what
your options are and how you want to proceed, and you can migrate to
a new platform on YOUR OWN timetable, not someone else's. And in
the meantime, your business operations are not negatively impacted.
In the SaaS model, it doesn't matter if you have a complete,
unabridged, and up-to-date export of the data: when the product is
discontinued without warning, and the company shuts down the
software servers, YOU ARE SO SCREWED. That data export does you
zero good if you don't have product to process and interpret and act
on it. In the case of billing software, this means you are not
collecting payments for service from your customers, which is a big
problem. Even if you could find a suitable replacement for the
software the next day, you still have to figure out how to massage
the data export you do have so that the new software can import it,
work through the inevitable imperfections of that import (certain
fields from the export that don't map cleanly to fields in the new
product), learn a new piece of software from scratch, and figure out
how to get by or work around issues resulting from "feature X" that
you depended heavily on in the old software but which no longer
exists in any form in the new one. Things WILL be complete chaos
for a while; there's no way around this.
We are actively looking for a new billing platform, and in the
meantime we have been running a piece of software that we bought and
implemented back when it was in active development but which has now
been discontinued for years. The reason that this is even possible
is because it is self-hosted. Back when this product was being
developed, it was very popular and sold very well. Nothing is "too
big to fail".../nothing/. Heck, Google has shitcanned their fair
share of services over the years after deeming them inviable,
leaving devoted users of them high-and-dry.
That we have personally experienced having a billing software vendor
go belly-up gives us great pause when it comes to evaluating our
options in the hosted/cloud space. This is not to say that we would
never consider billing-in-the-cloud, but it would have to be
/awfully/ compelling, and I think it would greatly help if there
were certain guarantees in place. One example would be if the
developer held the source code of the software in escrow, to be
automatically released if a "dead man's switch" were tripped. I
suspect this is what Matt has in mind when he talks about
"contracts" -- they are not just about protecting the seller, but
about protecting both parties.
-- Nathan
*From:*Af [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Matt Hoppes
*Sent:* Tuesday, October 17, 2017 11:37 AM
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Local install.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:32, Josh Reynolds <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Good luck with that. Any company could close up shop today, and
if they are bankrupt, they are bankrupt.
On Oct 17, 2017 12:27 PM, "Matt Hoppes"
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
It also means at any point they can just close up shop leaving
my data and my customer information high and dry with no recourse.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:24, Josh Reynolds <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
They provide enough value to avoid locking you in a
contract that would otherwise retain your business when they
don't continuously earn it.
Others are NOT the same.
On Oct 17, 2017 12:22 PM, "Matt Hoppes"
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
No contract? That's frankly beyond scary.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:06, Adam Moffett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Sonar is strictly per user with no contract, so if
you haven't migrated any users in yet then you pay
the minimum.....which I think is $100/month.
------ Original Message ------
From: "Matt Hoppes"
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Sent: 10/17/2017 9:16:46 AM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Fail.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 08:54, Lewis Bergman
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Many of them start charging you regardless
if you are on their system yet. Once you
sign the contract, you start paying.
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 6:00 PM Nathan
Anderson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I can understand this if the product in
question is purchased/licensed for a
one-time upfront fee. However, if you
have a SaaS model with recurring
revenues, it seems like it would be in
your best interest to help the customer
move existing data over to your product
cost-free, and thus get them to be a
paying customer ASAP.
-- Nathan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:*Af <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf
of Lewis Bergman
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*Sent:* Monday, October 16, 2017 3:36 PM
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Yea, this seems to be a common practice
in the software industry. What they all
should really say is that they help you
convert. I am going through this with
ECi at the moment. We paid several
thousand for them to convert our
database. What it really was was a half
hearted gesture at putting the DB into
an excel spreadsheet that they spent
zero time checking for sanity. They
expect us to do all that.
It seems that most software companies
expect their customers to have a whole
team of people doing what seems to be
the software companies job. Not saying
Sonar fits the description, just that
that seems to be the rule not the exception.
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 5:24 PM Sterling
Jacobson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Taking forever to migrate from
Platypus to Sonar.
I was told conversion was free, but
they didn't tell me I had to do all
my own conversion from Plat to
Sonar, so in my mind that's not free.
I paid Spender Lambert to move some
initial data to their format, but
I've been on a hold with Sonar since
last month.
Super excited to get going with a
'modern' billing system, but so far
the process has been a total snoozer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Total Control Panel*
Login <https://asp.reflexion.net/login?domain=litewire.net>
To: [email protected]
<https://asp.reflexion.net/address-properties?aID=242260993&domain=litewire.net>
From:
0100015f2c49b6fa-d64f702e-c9cd-4d6d-8e09-2856eb17931b-000...@amazonses.com
Remove
<https://asp.reflexion.net/FooterAction?ver=3&un-wl-sender-domain=1&hID=23974073144&domain=litewire.net>
amazonses.com from my allow list
/You received this message because the domain amazonses.com is on your
allow list./
