Not Your Typical IT Guys

It was July 18th 2008 when our paycheck disappeared and Daniel and I were now the creators of our own destiny… or paychecks for that matter!

Today is July 18th 2011, 3 years later and we are rockin out! Our business has more than quadrupled in 3 years and we are on track to accelerate the growth even faster.

Its hard to believe, 3 years ago few people were not talking about “Cloud Computing” or hosted network service providers. Now, Cloud Computing has over 82M hits on Google and was one of the biggest topics at the AICPA Tech Conference this year. It appears timing is everything and we picked the right time to be in the game and helping a lot of businesses out.

Anyway, the Blog has been a bit stale since we have been so busy working on out business, working to change that.

See you soon!

I was hanging out last week at the Maryland CPA Summit with a lot of brilliant folks!  Speaking of which, I was chatting with Eric Cohen (have you heard of XBRL?  Yeah that’s him!) Eric was reviewing our propaganda and kept seeing a common theme he was seeing throughout the conference, “Cloud Computing.” The theme of Cloud Computing was puzzling Eric because he was perplexed but what is so new about  Cloud Computing… he had heard of it before.  So Eric asked, “What about Cloud Computing today is so different than what Red Gorilla of the 1990’s was doing?” (yes kids we had computers back then)

Like all good experts (I type this with a grain of salt), I answered his question with a question, “Who was Red Gorilla?”  I jumped online found someone who had cached their website and also found this article from CNET in December of 2000, discussing the fate of Red Gorilla.  You see, Red Gorilla was an early days ASP (Application Service Provider) that was truly ahead of its time.  They had developed an online Time and Billing system that they were offering with freemium pricing.  If you explore the website you will find the screens shots are pretty similar to screen shots you would see on many of today’s time and billing systems.

Well, to sum up the CNET article, Red Gorilla vanished one day with 33,000 clients SOL.  Way back in the 1990’s there were some key Saas questions that nobody was asking.  Those questions are the same concerns today that many folks are talking about and still don’t necessarily have answers depending on the Service Provider.

• Who owns the data?
• Can I get my data out in a usable format?
• Do you guarantee up-time?
• What happens if I stop using your service?

At Simplified Innovations is seems we are often getting lumped into the SaaS bucket.  When in fact we are not SaaS (PaaS is more accurate but that is another conversation for another day), we don’t develop software nor do we use a browser to deliver the software.  Don’t get me wrong, many of the benefits of SaaS are exist with Simplified Innovations, however we can candidly answer these questions.

• Who owns the date? —— YOU DO!  Its your data, we claim no rights to it.  The data was yours before you being working with us and the data is yours if you ever decide to leave.
• Can I get my data out in a usable format? —– YES!  We don’t convert your data into some proprietary database format that will require a conversion program
• Do you guaranteed up-time? —– YES!  We have a Service Level Agreement with all of our clients guaranteeing system availability.  We have spent significant time and money developing a virtualized infrastructure to ensure we can meet these guarantees.
• What happens if I stop using your service? —— YOU GET YOUR DATA BACK.  We will furnish you with your data and software for you to manage in-house or take to another service provider.  We have no need to hold our clients hostage.

How many of you remember Red Gorilla?  What do you think, have we learned anything?

“You didn’t include the attachment”

Don’t tell me you have never received this email!  I know I do at least once a month… maybe I shouldn’t admit that… well, I must not be the only one, because Microsoft OfficeLabs has developed the “Forgotten Attachment Detector” (FAD) for Outlook 2007/2010.

It scans the content of your emails and will notify you if it thinks you should have attached something.  Pretty slick.

Also, while I was at OfficeLabs I downloaded a “NonLinear” presentation add-in for PowerPoint… honestly I have actually been wishing for this for a long time.

There are a few other downloads there that might be fun to play with and looks like it will be worth keeping an eye on the site for future toys.