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| Q What is a 'Hosted Application'? |
A
When you go out and buy a program and install it on your computer, you are the one
responsible for the installation, configuration and maintenance of that program. You are the one responsible for making sure that you have enough RAM, Disk storage, the right video card, etc. If the installation doesn't go well, you have to figure out why. And, when your computer crashes (they all do eventually) its up to you to reinstall the software and restore the data from your backups. What, you don't have backups? Hosted applications aren't on your computer. You don't have to install them--you just link to them like you do a website. The databases run on servers that are much larger and faster than any small business could justify. The servers are managed 24 hrs a day 7 days a week by professional IT staff. The data is backed up each night so if something goes wrong, the recovery will be fairly painless. The likelyhood of a failure is much less than it would be on an in-house server because of that 24/7 IT staff. They monitor the servers and replace components based on their MTBF statistics and performance. If your PC crashes, you can use another one that has internet access. If you are traveling, you are as close to your hosted applications as you are to the Internet. |
| Q Can our little company afford Basis For Business? |
A
The short answer is yes. Isn't that what you would expect us to say? Most Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs are sold by the seat license. The prices for hosted applications range from around $35 / month per seat up to over $150/mo. They usually require that you bay a full year in advance! What if you don't like it or your needs change in 6 months? If you are using off-the-shelf software that you install and maintain in-house, you would buy a 5, 10 or 25 seat license. If you have a 5 seat license and you hire your sixth sales agent, you have to upgrade your software to the 10 seat license. Guess what? That license will typically cost nearly twice what you paid for your 5 seat license. A lot of times, small companies will hire a new sales rep and have them working closely with an experienced rep. The new guy ends up sharing a user id with the seasoned rep until the busines being generated can warrent spending the money for the upgrade. This is like having the new guy sit on the other guy's lap. So, What does B4B cost? It's $59/month for up to 40 agents . There is a $99 one-time setup charge. If you use huge amounts of data (over 500 GB) there will be a nominal charge for the extra storage. Most companies will never have that much data on our servers because it is stored very efficiently. |
| Q If we buy a mailing list from a vendor like infoUSA, how do we get the data into B4B? |
A
Basis for Business will import data from standard CSV files. All the major lead generating
companies supply their data in this format. Additionally, most spreadsheet software like Excel and database products such as Act! can save data as CSV files. That means that if you have Excel spreadsheets you can export them as CSVs and import them into B4B. |