Foundation Software Reduces Operational Costs and Improves User Experience
About Foundation Software
For more than 40 years, Foundation Software has been America’s #1 provider of construction software and services, delivering job cost accounting, estimating and takeoff, project management, safety management, HR management, mobile time tracking, payroll services and more to help contractors run the business side of construction. To learn more, visit www.foundationsoft.com.
The Challenge
Foundation Software is highly attuned to the needs of contractors in the construction industry. In Foundation Software’s early years, its customers ran FOUNDATION® on-premises. In the mid-2010s, anticipating their customers’ need to run their software from anywhere, Foundation Software evaluated various application delivery solutions to enable customers’ remote access to FOUNDATION.
Foundation Software ultimately chose to use the application delivery technology included in Microsoft® Windows Server® to deliver FOUNDATION as a SaaS-based solution. At that time, the company felt that the capabilities in Windows Server best enabled the company to meet their customers’ needs and expectations.
However, this technology choice, made with customer satisfaction top-of-mind, ultimately proved to be costly for the company due to the technology’s software licensing model. While Foundation Software licenses their software to customers by concurrent user, the application delivery technology is licensed by named user.
As Foundation Software grew to where they were adding a significant volume of new user accounts every week, the difference in licensing models began to greatly increase overall operational costs. Additionally, issues with the application delivery technology began creating technical, customer service, and sales challenges for Foundation Software that also reduced operational efficiency.
As Foundation Software acquired new customers and converted existing clients from the on-premises solution to the hosted environment, the company saw increases in support calls regarding connection stability and application performance.
In parallel, as the number of customers using non-Windows® devices increased, Foundation’s support team experienced corresponding increases in calls related to setting up and using FOUNDATION on those devices.
But the most significant technical and customer service issue for Foundation Software was the application delivery technology’s inability to allow users to reset their passwords. Joshua K. Orens, Infrastructure Manager at Foundation Software, explains, “One of the biggest challenges that we ran into from a technical perspective was password resets. We had clients who would forget their passwords all the time. They didn't have the ability to reset their own password due to a limitation with Window’s native capabilities. This generated quite a few Support calls and security risk for our customers.”
In parallel to these issues, it became critical for an increasing number of FOUNDATION customers that they comply with industry regulations related to their accounting data, driving an increase in requests from prospects and customers for multi-factor authentication (MFA). Due to limitations with the application delivery technology, Foundation Software was unable to supply MFA for those customers and prospects.
“Since our standardization on Windows Server’s application delivery technology, our challenges with that technology grew so much that we reached a point where we said, ‘all right—we can’t continue this path. We need to do something to solve these problems.’" - Joshua Orens, Infrastructure Manager, Foundation Software
As Josh said, “Since our standardization on Windows Server’s application delivery technology, our challenges with that technology grew so much that we reached a point where we said, ‘all right—we can’t continue this path. We need to do something to solve these problems.’"
Josh began to look for a remote access technology alternative to the current solution.
The Solution: GO-Global
Foundation Software’s criteria for a replacement was to find a tool that would 1) provide a great user experience; 2) enable users to reset their own passwords; 3) provide multi-factor authentication; 4) scale economically; and 5) license by concurrent—not named—user.
After several hours of Googling, Josh found GO-Global®. Said Josh, “When I got to the GO-Global website, I saw that the licensing model aligned exactly with how we deliver our application. That seemed like a natural fit. Then I saw that GO-Global offered MFA. I decided to download the free trial and take a closer look.”
After his initial review of the GO-Global trial, Josh noted other capabilities that made GO-Global seem like a strong contender to replace the current solution. “I saw that the GO-Global AppController® was designed to provide a better end user experience on mobile devices. That was extremely vital to us, and the remote access technology we were using at the time has nothing like that.”
“I also saw that GO-Global’s Admin Console made management of existing sessions much easier and faster than our current technology. The Admin Console responded quickly and allowed me to see exactly where clients were connected and what app server they were connected to. It provided a much nicer administrative experience for my system engineers.”
Even though he knew the process would be challenging, Josh decided to implement a proof-of-concept (POC) project using GO-Global, with participation from executive management, plus representation from the Application Development, Quality Assurance, Infrastructure, and Cybersecurity teams. “Change is always very difficult. If we switched to GO-Global, we would have to change how we deliver the application, our process, all kinds of stuff. I wanted every department that would be affected to be involved with the POC from the beginning.”
“The moment that really, really made it clear that this change would be good came after a few months of working with GO-Global and the internal Foundation Software teams…in a status meeting, the project manager looked at the list of outstanding issues and said, ‘Wow. GO-Global solved all of these issues. I think this is actually going to work!’ I thought, oh my gosh, if THIS group has all bought in, GO-Global is going to be the product that brings it home for us.” - Joshua Orens, Infrastructure Manager, Foundation Software
Josh noted when he realized this all might come together perfectly, “The moment that really, really made it clear that this change would be good came after a few months of working with GO-Global and the internal Foundation Software teams…in a status meeting, the project manager looked at the list of outstanding issues and said, ‘Wow. GO-Global solved all of these issues. I think this is actually going to work!’”
“I thought, oh my gosh, if THIS group has all bought in, GO-Global is going to be the product that brings it home for us.”
Foundation Software’s implementation team was highly meticulous throughout the process of switching to GO-Global for delivering FOUNDATION to remote users. They took extra care to ensure that every department that would touch the application—for example, Customer Service, Product Training, and Sales—had a chance to provide feedback. Josh remarked, “It was refreshing to tackle the project from the ground up instead of simply providing it to internal users after the solution was complete and expecting them to just figure it out.”
After some discussion, the implementation team decided to include GO-Global’s Two-Factor Authentication feature in the initial rollout. Adding the feature would address the emerging market need for enhanced security.
Regarding Foundation Software’s experience working with GO-Global, Josh explained, “One of the keys to our success was the value-add that GO-Global provided. The GO-Global tech team really rolled up their sleeves and worked with us. They actually asked for app access so they could solve problems faster. I’ve never had a vendor do that. Also, when we submitted an issue to GO-Global, we would get a response in hours.”
The Results
Foundation Software’s rollout started with net new customers and customers transitioning from their on-premises implementation to the hosted solution. The company’s client success team followed up with new clients to check on their user experience. Josh recalls, “New client feedback was very positive right from the beginning. No issues with setting passwords, logins, password resets, app performance, or dropped sessions.”
After a month of uneventful new and transitional customer onboarding, Foundation Software began migrating existing customers to GO-Global, first 5 customers per day (25 to 50 users), then 15, then 25, then 50, until the infrastructure team got to the point where they began migrating an entire server at one time.
Existing customer migration took 6 months and was completed in December 2023. Since then, Foundation Software has seen the following improvements due to using GO-Global:
- Password reset requests reduced by 98%
- Supporting 20% more connected users per app server with no resource increase
- 72% decrease in disconnect support calls
- 10% reduction in time spent on Windows patching
- Uptime of 99.999%
Josh observed, “in addition to allowing customers to reset their own passwords, GO-Global gave us considerable control over user settings that allowed us to give customers a much better experience when using FOUNDATION. And we’ve greatly reduced operational costs due to GO-Global’s concurrent user licensing.”
“GO-Global is a Windows ISV-centric company. What sets the GO-Global team apart from other vendors is that our priorities are truly their priorities. It was great working with them on this project, and I look forward to continued success with GO-Global.” - Joshua Orens, Infrastructure Manager, Foundation Software
Josh summed up his experience with GO-Global this way: “GO-Global is a Windows ISV-centric company. What sets the GO-Global team apart from other vendors is that our priorities are truly their priorities. It was great working with them on this project, and I look forward to continued success with GO-Global.”
About GO-Global
GO-Global was created to enable organizations to publish Windows® applications from any public, private, or hybrid cloud, to any device that supports a browser. Using GO-Global, IT can deliver Windows applications at up to 40% less than Microsoft® RDS and up to 70% less that VDI solutions from Citrix® and VMware®. Despite its low cost, GO-Global delivers enterprise-level scalability but is easy to install, configure, and use, with considerably less technology overhead required for implementation. For more information, visit www.graphon.com or book some time with our team!
