Jonas Premier
SaaS offering on Windows Azure
Steve Ecclestone – VP of Product Development,
Jonas Construction
Who We Are
• Subsidiary of Constellation Software
• Jonas Construction
– Leading provider of construction and service
management software
– Providing solutions for more than 20 years
– Over 1200 customers
What we have done
• Built a brand new ERP on Windows Azure. The
offering includes:
Modules included are:
General Ledger
Job Costing (extensive)
Accounts Payable
Subcontract Management
Purchase Order
System Administration
Inventory
Full Suite of Reports
Bank Management
Form Designer (invoices, PO’s, etc.)
Accounts Receivable
Document Management
Construction Billing
Ad Hoc Report Generator
Time Entry
Business challenge leading to Azure
• Penetrate new market segment – SMB
– Few customers
Many customers
– Enhanced self service capabilities
– Scale to market needs
– Costs aligned to revenue
• Pilot Cloud for rest of company
Steps along the journey
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Select a development partner to assist us
TCO study and business case for technology
Product blueprint and release timeline
Pilot to prove the technology
Build Phase
Current Status of the build
Go to Market strategy
#1 - Selecting Development Partner
We are a software developer but felt we needed
more expertise in several key areas.
• Web development experience
• Solution Architecture
• Project Management experience
• Greater speed to market
#2 - TCO Criteria
The TCO was derived by estimating the costs for
the production instances.
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Compute Power (doubled for failover)
Database(s)
Storage
Data Transfer
Storage Transfer
The costs for additional environments(QA & Dev)
are relatively static.
#2 - TCO study
#2 Why Cloud? /Why Azure?
• Developer Benefits – don’t have to buy and
maintain all the infrastructure
• Marketing Benefits - Cloud has a cache about
it, it will help sell the product. Leverage the
Microsoft brand to sell our product.
• Relationship – We are a partner and feel we
have leverage to influence the offering.
#2 - Estimated costs over 48 months
4 year Totals
Azure $450K
Rackspace $609K
#3 - Product Blueprint & Release Timeline
• Blueprint – we know what to build, we have
about 1200 clients/15,000 users across North
America
• Release Timeline – ASAP – selected an
offshore development team to increase the
speed to market.
#4 - Pilot Phase
• Risk Mitigation – if we were going to fail we
would like to fail as quickly and as cheaply as
possible
• We built a very broad but thin slice of the
application to prove that the technology was
fast and robust enough for an ERP
# 5 Build Phase
• Solution architecture and database structure
was done locally
• Most of the coding was done offshore
(Manila)
#5 - Current status
• Development is complete we are fixing bugs, a
lot of bugs
– Early customer/prospect reviews are
overwhelmingly positive
• Original schedule called for a full launch in
January. We underestimated the UAT portion
of the project. Actual full launch will be the
end of March.
# 5 Conservative Prospects
Construction companies tend to be very
conservative and late adopters of technology
• Reliability – Will the solution always be available
• Data Offsite – Is it secure, is it private?
Microsoft - the brand is known and trusted
Cloud – is the latest ‘buzz’, helps prospects to
understand they are getting the latest
technology and are buying the ‘right’ solution
# 6 – Go to Market Strategy
Branding
Historical
Jonas Brands
Enterprise
Premier
Marketing and Website strategy
Traditional
Web Centric
Print
Pricing
Perpetual +
Maintenance
Subscription
Sales operational structure
Single Sales
Multiple Sales
Team
Teams
Sales Process
Few Deals
Multiple Deals
Support
Low Volume
High Volume
Learning's
• Build less , get to market sooner
– V1 was too extensive, if we had scaled back the features we would have 30
-40 customers by now
• Better understanding of the technology that is being used
– Silverlight has a limited future which means there will be less development
by both by Microsoft and 3rd parties.
• Offshore development - worked well for the build phase but is
cumbersome in the current UAT phase
– Intermittent problems, funky screens, etc. are hard to document, better to
show someone
• Going first is never any fun
• we new that going in but it is worth mentioning again
Offshore Development
• Documentation – needs to be very good
• Language & Culture – are more significant
than you realize
• Talent - Offer some very talented people at a
lower cost
• Ability to Scale the team - Suitable for a
project where there is significant initial
development
I’m Done
• Questions & Comments