6 KEY STEPS TO FINDING THE RIGHT MANAGED HOSTING SOLUTION FOR YOUR COMPANY

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1 Brovanture Whitepaper TO HOST OR NOT TO HOST? 6 KEY STEPS TO FINDING THE RIGHT MANAGED HOSTING SOLUTION FOR YOUR COMPANY Gavin Jones Brovanture

2 CONTENTS Introduction Key Steps to Finding the Right Managed Hosting Solution for your Company 4 Conclusion... 5

3 To Host or Not to Host? 6 Key Steps to Finding the Right Managed Hosting solution for your Company Managed Hosting from Brovanture offers customers the flexibility to choose what services they need to tailor their hosting environment within a multisourcing environment. Brovanture is an Oracle Gold Partner specialising in the supply, implementation and support of Enterprise Performance Management Systems. The focus is on the Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting and Reporting solutions first developed and brought to market by Hyperion prior to their being acquired by Oracle. Managed Hosting from Brovanture across the Oracle Hyperion suite of financial software offers a breadth of service, allowing a customer to choose which services they need and so tailor their hosted multisource environment. Services can be added or subtracted as needed, enabling the customer to evolve their hosting environment in tandem with the needs of their business. This flexible solution is ideal for companies wanting to reserve a level of control, yet still be backed up by a dedicated, skilled team committed to providing 100% infrastructure uptime and responsive support. Brovanture is focused on the provision of Enterprise Performance Management systems into the mid-market. These companies are all about getting more done with fewer resources. Equally they are not content with the status quo; they have ambitions for growth too. Mid-Market Companies Brovanture is focused on the provision of Enterprise Performance Management systems into the mid-market. These companies are all about getting more done with fewer resources. Equally they are not content with the status quo; they have ambitions for growth too. To achieve their goals and stay ahead of the competition, midmarket companies need to have the right people and processes in place, and technology in the form of Managed Hosting can be a key enabler of both. The mid-market executive today is continuously looking to improve performance, connect with customers, streamline supply chains and build solid infrastructure. The complexity of the tools used in most businesses makes it impractical or uneconomic for them to be handled in-house.

4 Many companies are therefore outsourcing any functions that are not core to their business expertise. The provision of a Managed Hosting offering in combination with Oracle-Hyperion provides a dynamic mix of services that frees the mid-market to focus on its specialist areas Enablement Managed Hosting enables companies to take advantage of critical functions and services without building, expanding or operating computing hardware, software or infrastructures. However, business and technology decision-makers must examine and prioritise organisational needs and constraints to decide effectively if and where Managed Hosting can improve business operations. To host or not to host that is the question To host or not to host depends on multiple factors. Generally this centers around the specific needs, goals and constraints affecting the client company, as do the following statements. 6 Key Steps to Finding the Right Managed Hosting Solution for your Company 1. IT infrastructure management and optimisation are not core competencies central to the client company. Even if the client company has IT infrastructure it can t or won t outsource, there will be some IT management solutions likely worth consideration, to minimise the investment and internal resources necessary to keep the system running at optimum. 2. IT capital and/or staffing expenditures are rising/continuing to rise within the client company. If one of the reasons businesses invest in IT is to improve/increase operational efficiency, the argument should be that IT costs go down, not up, as the business becomes more IT-dependent? Executive strategy is always interested in reducing costs, or at least attenuating their growth rates. Managed Hosting can help you achieve both goals, when applied to the right management solution.

5 3. There are physical limits to the client company s ability to grow and/or improve its IT resources. Even companies with well-designed, incredibly efficient server closets or data centers are increasingly running out of room, access to sufficient power and cooling, or some combination of all of the above. Managed Hosting solutions can help here, by enabling improvement of computing resources with no additional premises-based hardware required. 4. User demands for IT resources support or internal consulting is growing faster than the client company s ability to meet them and siphoning limited resources away from the client company s core business activities. Rapid growth in demand for IT resources has many potential causes. Typical examples within Performance Management include new complexities within reporting, additional financial models for strategy development and the traditional impact of added support for merger, acquisition and organic organisational growth. Managed Hosted Performance Management solutions can often be deployed rapidly and scaled up quickly. (Equally such solutions can also be scaled downward should economic conditions dictate such a response, usually much more easily and economically than premises-based hardware and platform software.) 5. The client company needs to deploy a new application or service rapidly with minimal operational disruption and/or to extend critical applications or services to users where there is no or limited IT support resources. Business responsiveness and competitive agility require flexible and rapidly adaptable business and technology infrastructures. Should the company recognise a new opportunity or faces a new competitive threat; it should be able to respond in hours to days, not weeks to months. Managed Hosted solutions can be up and running much faster than traditional alternatives especially if server capacity and/or room and/or power for more servers is exhausted. Regarding users with limited or no local IT support resources, Managed Hosting solutions make such situations easy to address. This is especially true if the needs of users in such locations can be satisfied largely with the core features and functions of those solutions.

6 6. The client company would like to move critical IT resources to fewer, more modern platforms to improve performance and/or reduce requirements for increasingly scarce and expensive support resources. As long as client companies are planning to move resources to new platforms anyway, it is worth at least considering turning the operation and management of those platforms over to full-time experts elsewhere. Conclusion This whitepaper has looked at what is managed hosting and why Brovanture may be able to offer the right strategy for your company. Furthermore, it has suggested 6 different steps to finding the right managed hosting solution for your company. For further information or a quote on Brovanture Managed Hosting of Oracle Hyperion please us at info@brovanture.com visit us at: or call: + 44 (0)