We believe that both models (SaaS and On-Premise) can be cost effective - it’s really a matter of customer preference. With Cherwell Service Management, both models provide more power for less money than offered by our competition. Our hybrid SaaS approach offers even more flexibility. We work with your company to determine which model best suits your current needs. If you change your mind later – or if your business requirements change - no problem! Our hybrid approach offers the ability to switch from one model to the other.
Cherwell On-Premise is our traditional, concurrent user license model. This model is often required by government, financial and healthcare clients, who for a variety of reasons (e.g., security, regulatory, etc.) are required to purchase perpetual licenses and host the application and data on their own systems and premises. Some analysts recommend that companies own their software licenses to reduce an organization's long term risk. This model is also appropriate for customers who need to purchase software licenses from their capital expenditure budget.
For other customers who choose to have their software and data hosted elsewhere (often called "cloud computing" or "Hosted Solutions"), we offer Cherwell On Demand, a SaaS model that allows companies to utilise the software without any capital expenditure. Instead, all expenses for licensing, hosting and maintaining the software are paid out of a company's operating budget. This model offers lower start-up costs because the application licenses are leased rather than owned.
Cherwell On Demand has an added benefit – a “lease to own” option, giving customers the best of both worlds. Each year that a customer uses Cherwell On Demand equates to a discount off the license fees for Cherwell On Premise, should a customer decide at a later date to switch models and bring the application in-house. The longer a customer uses Cherwell On Demand, the greater the discount. It’s the best of both worlds, and offers the most flexibility in the market today.
Cherwell strives to provide the option that best fits our customer’s environment and budget. We won't mandate one model or the other -- we'll let the customer decide.
Our SaaS implementation is superior than most similar models because of the following:
I.T Insight have partnered with YourASP utilising their expertise and Tier 1 Carrier Grade Data Centre. YourASP are one of Australia's leading and most innovative Application & Internet Service Providers. They host custom applications and deliver them to you over the internet. While high speed fast fibre optic links ensure instant access to applications, our backup procedures, network monitoring, firewalls, secured facilities, and trusted HP, Dell, Cisco Systems, Microsoft and McAfee technology means that with YOURasp, your information is safer than ever - totally guarded against crashes and content loss.
1) Virtual Environment. Other companies that offer a SaaS model generally implement a “one size fits all” approach. In other words, they have very limited ability to customize their applications. With Cherwell On Demand, we provide a hosted virtual environment for each customer, which allows every customer to utilize the Cherwell Development Platform (which uses Codeless Business Application Technology) to customize any application and to make changes to our “out of the box” service management content.
2) Data Security and Control. With Cherwell On Demand, the customer’s hosted data is logically separated from other companies’ data, and each customer always has access to their own data. This means that they have the power to back up their data “on their premises” as often as they like! This is critical if there are security and recovery concerns.
3) Instant Recovery. For an additional monthly charge, Cherwell On Demand includes a recovery feature. With Instant Recovery, our host system will keep a rolling snapshot of the customer’s system, which enables near-instantaneous recovery in situations where the customer’s database is damaged due to human error or data corruption. This is great for mission-critical implementations.
4) Rich Client Experience. Whereas most of our competitions' SaaS models are “browser-based,” Cherwell On Demand is a rich-client experience. So we offer the best of both worlds – Windows and the Internet. Our data is transferred over the internet the same way that a browser application transfers data. However, we don’t have the overhead of transmitting screens over the internet, so our user experience is faster and far superior. Our SaaS implementation requires less bandwidth to gather the same information. Additionally, browser applications do not support "data caching," which allows local storage and instant retrieval of commonly accessed data. So our approach offers far less delays when there is heavy internet traffic.
Bottom line: Browser applications are fine when the application is used on a very limited basis, but when someone spends much of their day in an application, the rich-client application is a far superior experience. The only advantage of browser-based applications is ease-of-deployment. We achieve this same advantage with our auto-deploy feature.