“It was a true “eureka moment” when our partner showed us GO-Global. It really took off for us. Had that moment not happened, had we not had that conversation, who knows where we would be? It’s possible that we would still be muddling along with self-installs and not having grown as much as we have.” - GO-Global Client
This is the story of how one software company transformed their business after discovering GO-Global. This company leveraged deep industry expertise in developing their flagship product, a feature-rich DSD application. The application was typically installed and ran on customers’ local servers and networks. While this approach eliminated issues related to distributing the software on physical media, it did create several challenges.
The most fundamental challenge to this approach was that it required the customer to have local IT resources and personnel (specifically, a dedicated networking and server specialist) to manage those resources. This limited the potential market to larger organizations that had the resources, personnel, and business need to run a local network.
Additionally, implementing the software on the customer’s premises took weeks or even months while customers prepared their infrastructure to meet solution specs and made the various technical post-installation adjustments required to enable the solution to run efficiently and effectively.
Security was another challenge that loomed large. Because their solution was running on the customer’s premises, they could recommend—but not enforce—the heightened IT security and data backup practices they felt were necessary given the business-critical customer data that was being collected and leveraged. As a result, many of their customers who did not prioritize data security experienced malware attacks, resulting in expensive downtime and loss of customer and business data.
As they considered how to address these challenges, one of their customers approached them with a request. The customer was moving their entire infrastructure to the cloud—could they move their application to the customer’s new cloud infrastructure?
The team instantly realized that they could turn their challenges into opportunity by hosting their application in the cloud. Moving to the cloud would immediately expand their available customer universe, reduce new customer implementation time and effort, enable them to secure customer data using heightened security protocols, and conduct daily backups.
The Solution
The team immediately began to evaluate their options for hosting their application in the cloud. The customer moving its infrastructure to the cloud was using Microsoft® Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in a dedicated environment. After evaluation, they realized that using RDP would not work for them. RDP was susceptible to viruses and malware and did not provide end users with a great experience. And creating dedicated cloud environments for each customer would not give them the economies of scale they needed to make cloud-hosting financially feasible.
They needed a solution that was secure, allowing them the capability to host customers in a shared cloud environment, maintain separate customer datastores, and provide a great end user experience. Besides RDP, what technology was available? As their Managing Director recalled, “Citrix was the only game in town, but it’s expensive and complex.”
One of their trusted technology partners was also considering a move to the cloud and evaluating GO-Global for that purpose. When the partner demonstrated GO-Global for them, they saw their solution. Their Managing Director remembers that moment.
“Until then, we didn’t know that GO-Global was a possibility or an option. Most people can count on one hand the times in their personal or professional life where you made a right turn versus a left turn, and it paid dividends. I would count this as one of those moments! It was a true 'eureka moment' when our partner showed us GO-Global. It really took off for us. Had that moment not happened, had we not had that conversation, who knows where we would be? It’s possible that we would still be muddling along with self-installs and not having grown as much as we have.”
The Results
They chose a US-based data center to host and protect their cloud implementation of their application, manage security, apply patches, and back up customer data. Now, adding new customers or end users to that environment is easy, with implementation taking hours instead of days or weeks.
Their Managing Director observes, “Some customers are still self-hosting; that’s when we are reminded of the pains of the old days. Something that we can do in a couple of hours to a day takes weeks—sometimes months—with self-hosted customers.”
In addition to reducing implementation and support time, GO-Global has enabled them to sell services to target companies of any size and enforced heightened security, which has gained them new customers who’ve suffered through malware attacks.
Their Director of Sales & Marketing summed up their experience with GO-Global this way: “GO-Global played a key role in helping us move our customers to a secure cloud environment. Overall, it has been a great solution for us and has been a really big part of our growth.”
