I have talked to many wisps. Migrating from one billing platform to another seems to always be a time consuming process. I've heard over and over we are four months into this....six months into this. Sometimes the software can force you to do things you should have been doing all along (which is good) but can slow the transition.
I've told many of you publically I have a few different wisps with different ownership structures. I kept up with sonar well through the first few modules until the larger wisp purchased a company and we wound up having to import a lot of stuff. We let the techs do most of the data import but we had to make a lot of changes on the back end to make it live (for example, we migrated to a completely different subnet and moved everyone from pppoe to dhcp by mac address). We still have to make the telrad wimax talk with powercode and i haven't circled back around to that. In fact, I'm paying a 3rd billing system until I complete that process. I read the canopy manual when it first came out. Heck, I read the windows 3.1 manual when it came out from front to back. I like to know everything about a process and I regret that I haven't had the time to keep up with sonar's developments. It is next on my todo list to continue to implement in my smaller networks. Currently it bills the customers and the customers can pay their bills through it - - but there is so much more to sonar now than when I last watched the videos on billing..... ----- Original Message ----- From: Nathan Anderson To: af@afmug.com Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 5:43 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar So I'm confused...you're helping to make my point for me? :-) And "you will only be screwed for a very short time" can somehow be reconciled with the statement that "I think it took more than 6 months to actually get it up and going"...how exactly? In my world, 6 months is not "a very short time". And this is only talking about migrating from one non-cloud platform to another. Now imagine if the migration didn't occur because you simply wanted to get off an old dinosaur and could do so at your leisure, but was instead because aliens beamed your old dinosaur off the surface of the planet in the blink of an eye. One minute it's there, the next it's not. 6 months to implement == you're screwed. Royally screwed. Now, in this hypothetical scenario, the people doing the migration would have extra incentive to get it done and put the new system into production more quickly, but still. I saw Sterling's list of reasons why he wants to move to Sonar. I can understand and respect many of them. I would just like to point out that in his first post, he said he had been in a holding pattern with the Sonar migration for a month. For most of us in this industry, that equates to an entire billing cycle for nearly your entire customer base. I guess it's a good thing that he's migrating from Platypus, which isn't going out of business. And even if it was, it's not cloud-hosted. -- Nathan From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of ch...@wbmfg.com Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:28 PM To: af@afmug.com 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.
