This service certainly is used in conjunction with the requests for all kinds of online applications running on LAMP servers. For example, if people from several different companies are using LAMP to manage their energy expense management accounts, their whole company could easily use LAMP as a service instead of buying one or investing in infrastructure to build their own.
And that's an excellent solution as a lot of companies aren't buying their own server. They bought a service and they are using it and providing it as a service to their clients and it's easy because LAMP is completely managed for you.
But in the event that your organisation becomes more complex than that, you may want to consider a dedicated server. So, in this situation you're leasing a energy expense management licence for the FHPro company to manage your system. And that means you can create an SLA with a service provider and create a production level workload that you can potentially run on one of your own servers. This is a great solution for a number of reasons, but especially because you can take advantage of a great management and support agenda.
What you're providing to your service provider is the transaction data. You share the data and what you are providing is the service. If you're managing your own services, there are other things you need to think about, such as your own energy expense management infrastructure, and then you want to design and manage your own Infrastructure. So a fully managed on-site service is something you can definitely consider.
With that kind of service, you can enjoy all of these capabilities and a lot more, right in your own building. You can get a virtual hosting package and a managed hosting package. Something that's exclusive.
And this kind of hosted service is becoming more and more important over the last few years and in terms of IT infrastructure scheduling. We all know that a lot of companies do not have a dedicated server. The energy expense management have multiple managed servers, each with one virtual, dedicated server. That's good for some applications, but the reality is that in these applications some of the application clients, end users, etc. cannot access that virtual server. However, what they want is for all of that to be available at a moment's notice. Because that's what virtualization delivers.
You can take advantage of that by utilising a service that's managed and vendor supplied and you can take advantage of that way of doing IT. Just make sure you're delivering a service that fits your needs and if you get it, make sure you have what it takes to actually implement it.
This is really a new way of doing energy expense management business, and I was excited when we researched this service level agreement that I requested. The truth is more companies use this system now than they ever have before. I guarantee that even I, who has been using hosting to solve some of these issues now for years, am familiar with some of my assumptions and some of the disadvantages to implementing this type of service.
You may be able to cut a lot of some costs if you are able to implement and manage your own specific hosting package. But keep energy expense management in mind that it may not be the best long term solution for your organisation. In some cases, especially if you are wanting to replace an old infrastructure, it may have added a lot of extra work. In other cases, it might be a major investment. In the end you have to balance the investment, the options of what is available and of course what you can afford without jeopardising the overall effectiveness of your organisation.
Make sure as an IT manager or energy expense management business owner that you have fully planned your organisation's data centre before you attempt to implement any outside hosted service. From the capabilities of the service, to having all the supplies that you will need, it is important to make a very detailed plan to make sure that not the least bit of hiccups will occur.
And it's not just about the energy expense management cost either. Take into consideration all of the things that you need to have in your data centre and always make sure that you have them. You cannot just imagine what they will be once you start. And if you do, they will just get saturated quickly.
If you deal with your own system management and maintenance, there are a lot of things that you can do to relieve some of the burden.