Beca Applied Technologies provides software as a service (SaaS) to asset intensive industries. It forms part of one of the largest employee-owned engineering and related consultancy services groups in Asia-Pacific. “Our competitive advantage is that we have really smart people who are able to solve customer problems, even when the customer can’t describe the problem very clearly - we specialise in the blank whiteboard problem,” says Vaughan Robertson.

Beca needed to be able to provide its clients with instant access to a range of project support applications. They demand delivery via a flexible, reactive, scalable and secure environment; for which a reliable hosting hub is essential.

“It’s all about instant provisioning,” says Robertson.

SaaS delivery provides Beca with the capability to tailor the service without reference to the client’s existing IT infrastructure. And, since access to the applications is via an internet browser, clients don’t need to own particular hardware, software or infrastructure in order to run it.

Owning an IT environment with an equivalent specification wasn’t viable due to the required capital outlay and depreciation. Beca had been using an offshore host, but found the cost of international bandwidth and the complexities of communications with an offshore partner a disadvantage. The choice came back to the need for a combination of reliability and security and scalability.

After considering a combination of factors including total cost of ownership (TCO), reliability and confidence, Beca decided a New Zealand provider was its best bet. “We had a look around the New Zealand market and settled on ICONZ as the provider small enough to give us personal service and large enough to have the scalability we needed.”

Beca installed their software solutions onto the “Versa” platform from cloud hosting services provider ICONZ. Versa is a scalable virtual server infrastructure hosted in ICONZ data centres.

“We have the relationship to be able to solve problems. It’s easy to underestimate the value of a personal relationship.

It’s so much easier to do business with friends.” Vaughan Robertson, manager, BECA Applied Technologies

Keeping customers happy
Since completing the Versa implementation consumer complaints over reliability have dropped significantly, says Robertson. “Most importantly, in terms of overall customer reliability complaints, we’ve taken the hosting area out of the mix as the target for complaints.” He says the company has experienced an almost 100 percent improvement in technical complaints about delivery compared with its previous overseas provider experiences.

“Because it’s always on, available 24x7 and across the internet, it needs to be reliable.” But the ultimate metric lies with Beca’s clients: “We measure its success by the satisfaction of our clients and being able to deal with our customers with no surprises. Our customers don’t mind an outage. What they abhor is an outage they didn’t know about until it happens. There has to be top-quality communication about scheduled outages and unscheduled outages. So it has to be no surprises, rather than 100 percent uptime.”

Excellent SaaS delivery is usually greeted by customer silence, says Robertson. “If it’s going swimmingly you don’t hear a word, and if there is a problem, you get the walls shouted down. The whole idea of it is that the user gets the service and they don’t care about how the service is provided.”

However, that isn’t to say Beca never hears from its clients when projects go well. One government-related project Beca delivered recently was described by the customer as the most successful government initiative in support of the economy during the recession.

Improved communications
Robertson also had to consider Versa’s cost-competitiveness because Beca resells hosting services as part of its project support package. He says that while the cost of hosting has risen slightly as a percentage of Beca’s overall costs, Versa provides better value for money than any other option.

“When you take TCO into account and the soft benefits of reliability and scalability, it’s a no-brainer. In terms of total effort to maintain, Versa is better than any alternative.”

Beca’s bond with its customers is improved by efficient communication, and ICONZ has a part to play in that relationship. “We have the relationship to be able to solve problems,” says Robertson.

For the future, Beca has a vision of creating a suite of project support applications targeted at major projects and infrastructure alliances in the Asia- Pacific, and Versa will play an important part in its launch. “You’re talking about a scale of operations that’s an order of magnitude bigger than what we’re doing at the moment,” says Robertson. “We couldn’t contemplate this without having reliable and scalable hosting solution to be able to match our big plans.”




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11/09/20_ex_h_nl