Not Your Typical IT Guys

I was hanging out last week at the Maryland CPA Summit with a lot of brilliant folks!  Speaking of which, I was chatting with Eric Cohen (have you heard of XBRL?  Yeah that’s him!) Eric was reviewing our propaganda and kept seeing a common theme he was seeing throughout the conference, “Cloud Computing.” The theme of Cloud Computing was puzzling Eric because he was perplexed but what is so new about  Cloud Computing… he had heard of it before.  So Eric asked, “What about Cloud Computing today is so different than what Red Gorilla of the 1990’s was doing?” (yes kids we had computers back then)

Like all good experts (I type this with a grain of salt), I answered his question with a question, “Who was Red Gorilla?”  I jumped online found someone who had cached their website and also found this article from CNET in December of 2000, discussing the fate of Red Gorilla.  You see, Red Gorilla was an early days ASP (Application Service Provider) that was truly ahead of its time.  They had developed an online Time and Billing system that they were offering with freemium pricing.  If you explore the website you will find the screens shots are pretty similar to screen shots you would see on many of today’s time and billing systems.

Well, to sum up the CNET article, Red Gorilla vanished one day with 33,000 clients SOL.  Way back in the 1990’s there were some key Saas questions that nobody was asking.  Those questions are the same concerns today that many folks are talking about and still don’t necessarily have answers depending on the Service Provider.

• Who owns the data?
• Can I get my data out in a usable format?
• Do you guarantee up-time?
• What happens if I stop using your service?

At Simplified Innovations is seems we are often getting lumped into the SaaS bucket.  When in fact we are not SaaS (PaaS is more accurate but that is another conversation for another day), we don’t develop software nor do we use a browser to deliver the software.  Don’t get me wrong, many of the benefits of SaaS are exist with Simplified Innovations, however we can candidly answer these questions.

• Who owns the date? —— YOU DO!  Its your data, we claim no rights to it.  The data was yours before you being working with us and the data is yours if you ever decide to leave.
• Can I get my data out in a usable format? —– YES!  We don’t convert your data into some proprietary database format that will require a conversion program
• Do you guaranteed up-time? —– YES!  We have a Service Level Agreement with all of our clients guaranteeing system availability.  We have spent significant time and money developing a virtualized infrastructure to ensure we can meet these guarantees.
• What happens if I stop using your service? —— YOU GET YOUR DATA BACK.  We will furnish you with your data and software for you to manage in-house or take to another service provider.  We have no need to hold our clients hostage.

How many of you remember Red Gorilla?  What do you think, have we learned anything?

I just want to give a quick shout out to my friends at CPATechViews. They are consistently addressing great topics and backing them up with good content.  So much so I have to throttle myself from commenting on everything they write…

I would love to see more traffic in the comment section from others.  I have to imagine they are generating a pretty good volume of readers and the content would be that much better to see some conversations brewing in the comment section.  I know every one of you CPA’s out there reading this blog have been to at least 3 sessions about social media, web 2.0, etc, etc. 

Lets see you all put what you have learned to good use and step up from being just a reader of good content and start contributing to the conversations.  If you are out there maybe share a link in the comments here to your favorite blog.

Here is the release from the FTC… doesn’t say they are working on any exemption yet…just giving companies more time to prepare.  Hopefully everyone doesn’t go to sleep between now and June…