WatServ
Hosted ERP in a Cloud Computing Model

Cloud ERP platforms are gaining momentum as the customers gain benefit through application scalability and reduced hardware costs. Organizations are looking for hosted solutions coupled with the latest technologies including cloud. While most CIOs are open to embracing a cloud platform, there is a struggle to understand the different types of cloud, and how these differences are directly affecting organizations. WatServ makes it easy for customers by helping them understand the pricing and cloud environment options by focusing on Microsoft ERP systems with adaptive skills.

WatServ presents Cloud Hosting for Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP, NAV and CRM. They fill the gap between the services offered by infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Microsoft and the operational activities required by customers to guarantee application reliability, performance, and security. “As ERP systems evolve, they become more complex to manage. By our services, Microsoft customers can avoid having to hire and keep experienced IT resources that can be expensive,” says Tom Doerner, President, WatServ. “WatServ proffers managed services for the applications that run on our Azure platforms or on infrastructure.”

WatServ extends enterprise-class computing solutions in a simple, subscription-based model that are 30-50 percent lower in cost than running on-premise. WatServ bundles everything needed to run dynamics to a single per-user per-month cost. Typically, this cost includes four or more products and services. The subscription cost proposes the customer with the flexibility and agility to ramp up or down their costs as their business changes. “We have focused over the years on the larger end of the market and we have developed our software to add on to other platforms. Our software makes it easy to control the cost of managing the systems spread out over many customers,” explains Doerner. “The costs run into millions if customers think of building a data center with backup generators. But if five organizations adopt WatServ’s hosted solution, the capital cost would be spread across varied customers, not affecting our primary client.”

Our software makes it easy to manage the cost of managing the systems spread out over many customers

The company’s track record and reputation for outstanding application reliability, support, and performance is a differentiation in the industry.

Additionally, most of competitors focus on the SMB market, while WatServ tends to excel in the large enterprise solutions that tend to be deployed globally. “Our experienced staff provides an in-depth knowledge of the applications, not just the infrastructure, guiding the clients toward growth,” adds Doerner. For instance, the company has a large customer in Norway that was hosting their global implementation of Microsoft Dynamics AX with a competitor for several years. The infrastructure was reliable, but the hosting company had no experience with the AX application. This caused frequent business disruptions for end-users. Eventually, they moved all of their business applications from the infrastructure running in Norway to dedicated WatServ infrastructure in one of their U.S. data centers. The entire migration took place over one weekend with no impact on the business. Along with application reliability, the performance has been considerably better than they received from their competitor.

In the Microsoft cloud world, Azure has quickly gone from “the next big thing” to “just being big.” To embrace this new technology and meet market demands, WatServ released “JACK,” a self-service implementation portal for their Dynamics partners that makes it possible to deploy Dynamics NAV on Azure easily, in less than an hour rather than days. “In the coming months, we will be releasing our new product that will make it possible to deploy Dynamics GP2015 on Azure in the same way that we currently run Dynamics NAV,” concludes Doerner.