One of my first jobs (high school) was doing data conversion for a local
software vendor. Paid good money back in 1995 - $10 an hour. I'd work 12 hour
shifts with friends - we'd work 24 hour shifts (evenings and weekends). It was
massaging a lot of data , removing certain characters, etc. I forgot how many
records we had to review....it was a LOT.
This was a check / restitution billing system district attorney systems used
for collecting bad debts.
Worked great until Windows came along....
----- Original Message -----
From: Simon Westlake
To: af@afmug.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 5:39 PM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
And I would be amazed if a major vendor went out of business in this industry
and all the competitors didn't scramble to build tools to create a seamless
transition. We already have one click tools for most of our competitors to
import their data into Sonar, and we're working on the rest. The challenging
thing is that a lot of systems don't enforce good data consistency, so there is
junk to clean up. But if push comes to shove and you're willing to clean up
what you got, it can be done very quickly.
I think you also have to weigh up these worst case scenarios against reality.
There has yet to be a billing vendor in this industry that has stopped
operating in the 7 years I've been part of it, let alone close up shop in a 24
hour period and leave everyone in the cold. Is it worth using old software that
doesn't have the features you need because it offers some modicum of protection
against an unlikely event? That is up to you to balance, but these doomsday
scenarios are pretty unlikely, and if it's costing you a lot of efficiency and
potential revenue, then my personal feeling would be that it doesn't outweigh
the consequences. But everyone has to make their own risk assessment.
I think you will just see acquisitions occur if a vendor gets to the point
that they are struggling to operate. It would be silly for them to just
disappear into the night.
On 10/17/2017 4:15 PM, ch...@wbmfg.com wrote:
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.
--
Simon Westlake
Email: simon@sonar.software
Phone: (702) 447-1247 US / (780) 900-1180 CA
---------------------------
Sonar Software Inc
The future of ISP billing and OSS
https://sonar.software
