Then I guess you guys are in agreement on the facts, but disagree on the
severity of the problem?
------ Original Message ------
From: ch...@wbmfg.com
To: af@afmug.com
Sent: 10/17/2017 5:28:13 PM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
It never goes smoothly.
I used to work for banks, talk about a headache when you change out
their software that manages all the customer accounts etc. They
migrated off an old dinosaur main frame to an AS-400 with all the
latest software. I think it took more than 6 months to actually get it
up and going.
I have worked for several telephone companies and all of them have
migrated software, most of them multiple times. Again, never smooth,
always pain.
Ditto for WISPS, been there, done that too. Platypus was probably the
easiest due to the IT department being very hands on through the
process.
It never goes smoothly and they can guarantee everything to work all
they want, but it will not work perfectly without elbow grease.
From:Nathan Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 3:21 PM
To:af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Didn't this thread start out with somebody complaining that their new
vendor either wasn't willing to do this or weren't doing an effective
or good job of it? Vendor on-boarding is not always an option, or at
least is not something that is guaranteed to work or go smoothly.
-- Nathan
From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of ch...@wbmfg.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:15 PM
To:af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Been through this many times in my life. Done it both ways. Several
times.
Prefer the new vendor to do onboarding for me.
You get what you pay for.
From: Nathan Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 3:11 PM
To:af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Not true. It doesn't matter what the file format of the export is: you
still have to take the time to figure out how to shoehorn data from one
schema into another. As talked about earlier, maybe you'll get support
from your new vendor with that, maybe not. There will be mistakes made
during that process, and some of it will have to be re-done. You also
have to hook the new product into all of your authentication systems
and then test that to make sure it works and doesn't suddenly break
people's connections.
Then there will be the mistakes that come from actually using the new
software that you are unfamiliar with, and/or cajoling it to do what
you need it to do and which you already knew how to do with the old
software. People will get billed wrong for a while and then you'll
have to sort out that mess as your customers bring the billing mistakes
to your attention. Some people that need to get billed won't
be...others will get double-billed. Pro-rates will get miscalculated.
The system will on-hold somebody by mistake that shouldn't have been.
And on and on.
If the software is locally hosted, you can learn a new system and
transition over to it on your own schedule, instead of being pushed
into the deep end of the pool on day 1.
-- Nathan
From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of ch...@wbmfg.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:04 PM
To:af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Export backups as CSV and you can re-import it into any database. You
will only be screwed for a very short time.
From: Nathan Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:13 PM
To:af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
I have to say that I'm partially with Matt on this one.
It's really not about access to your own data, although that can
certainly be a component depending on how things are designed. It
sounds like perhaps Sonar has no problem giving you reasonable access
to exports of your data for you to backup yourself, and for the moment,
I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt on this.
I don't think I have to convince anyone how critical billing software
is to an organization. If it screws up or stops working, you are
losing money, and fast.
The SaaS model has some clear benefits to both parties (developer and
user), but it has an equal number of new downsides as well. One
big-E-on-the-eyechart one is what happens if the product is
discontinued, either because the parent company/developers go out of
business or for some other reason.
In the traditional software licensing and hosting model, where you use
your own computing resources to execute the code, if the development
company goes out of business one day, the software that you still
possess a copy of does not suddenly become less useful to you. Sure,
you won't get future upgrades and fixes to the product from the vendor,
but at least you have some time to figure out what your options are and
how you want to proceed, and you can migrate to a new platform on YOUR
OWN timetable, not someone else's. And in the meantime, your business
operations are not negatively impacted.
In the SaaS model, it doesn't matter if you have a complete,
unabridged, and up-to-date export of the data: when the product is
discontinued without warning, and the company shuts down the software
servers, YOU ARE SO SCREWED. That data export does you zero good if
you don't have product to process and interpret and act on it. In the
case of billing software, this means you are not collecting payments
for service from your customers, which is a big problem. Even if you
could find a suitable replacement for the software the next day, you
still have to figure out how to massage the data export you do have so
that the new software can import it, work through the inevitable
imperfections of that import (certain fields from the export that don't
map cleanly to fields in the new product), learn a new piece of
software from scratch, and figure out how to get by or work around
issues resulting from "feature X" that you depended heavily on in the
old software but which no longer exists in any form in the new one.
Things WILL be complete chaos for a while; there's no way around this.
We are actively looking for a new billing platform, and in the meantime
we have been running a piece of software that we bought and implemented
back when it was in active development but which has now been
discontinued for years. The reason that this is even possible is
because it is self-hosted. Back when this product was being developed,
it was very popular and sold very well. Nothing is "too big to
fail"...nothing. Heck, Google has shitcanned their fair share of
services over the years after deeming them inviable, leaving devoted
users of them high-and-dry.
That we have personally experienced having a billing software vendor go
belly-up gives us great pause when it comes to evaluating our options
in the hosted/cloud space. This is not to say that we would never
consider billing-in-the-cloud, but it would have to be awfully
compelling, and I think it would greatly help if there were certain
guarantees in place. One example would be if the developer held the
source code of the software in escrow, to be automatically released if
a "dead man's switch" were tripped. I suspect this is what Matt has in
mind when he talks about "contracts" -- they are not just about
protecting the seller, but about protecting both parties.
-- Nathan
From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Matt Hoppes
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 11:37 AM
To:af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Local install.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:32, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com> wrote:
Good luck with that. Any company could close up shop today, and if
they are bankrupt, they are bankrupt.
On Oct 17, 2017 12:27 PM, "Matt Hoppes"
<mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net> wrote:
It also means at any point they can just close up shop leaving my data
and my customer information high and dry with no recourse.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:24, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com> wrote:
They provide enough value to avoid locking you in a contract that
would otherwise retain your business when they don't continuously
earn it.
Others are NOT the same.
On Oct 17, 2017 12:22 PM, "Matt Hoppes"
<mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net> wrote:
No contract? That's frankly beyond scary.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:06, Adam Moffett <dmmoff...@gmail.com> wrote:
Sonar is strictly per user with no contract, so if you haven't
migrated any users in yet then you pay the minimum.....which I
think is $100/month.
------ Original Message ------
From: "Matt Hoppes" <mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net>
To: af@afmug.com
Sent: 10/17/2017 9:16:46 AM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Fail.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 08:54, Lewis Bergman <lewis.berg...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Many of them start charging you regardless if you are on their
system yet. Once you sign the contract, you start paying.
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 6:00 PM Nathan Anderson <nath...@fsr.com>
wrote:
I can understand this if the product in question is
purchased/licensed for a one-time upfront fee. However, if you
have a SaaS model with recurring revenues, it seems like it
would be in your best interest to help the customer move
existing data over to your product cost-free, and thus get them
to be a paying customer ASAP.
-- Nathan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Af <af-boun...@afmug.com> on behalf of Lewis Bergman
<lewis.berg...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2017 3:36 PM
To:af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Yea, this seems to be a common practice in the software
industry. What they all should really say is that they help you
convert. I am going through this with ECi at the moment. We paid
several thousand for them to convert our database. What it
really was was a half hearted gesture at putting the DB into an
excel spreadsheet that they spent zero time checking for sanity.
They expect us to do all that.
It seems that most software companies expect their customers to
have a whole team of people doing what seems to be the software
companies job. Not saying Sonar fits the description, just that
that seems to be the rule not the exception.
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 5:24 PM Sterling Jacobson
<sterl...@avative.net> wrote:
Taking forever to migrate from Platypus to Sonar.
I was told conversion was free, but they didn't tell me I had
to do all my own conversion from Plat to Sonar, so in my mind
that's not free.
I paid Spender Lambert to move some initial data to their
format, but I've been on a hold with Sonar since last month.
Super excited to get going with a 'modern' billing system, but
so far the process has been a total snoozer.
