Earlier this week a prospective client was telling me that he had compared several cloud providers.
He liked 2 of the providers based on their annual sales. The largest had annual sales of $250 million. The second largest had annual sales of $100 million.
To my way of thinking, annual sales is necessarily a good way to assess a hosting provider. In fact, it can be a misleading way to evaluate cloud hosting. Then again, I know a lot more about hosting providers than this prospective client.
Specifically, in both cases of the companies with large annual sales, the IBM i cloud hosting is a fraction of their overall business. Both companies have high annual sales based on other activity that has NOTHING to do with IBM i cloud hosting.
I get that a client wants confidence with a hosting provider and annual sales is one factor to consider.
However, I believe there are other factors that are also very important.
1. How many skilled IBM i engineers are on staff and what is their experience level? There can be a big difference between a small staff of 1 or 2 IBM i engineers with 5 years of field experience compared to a staff of 8 IBM i engineers with 20 years or more of field experience.
2. What technologies does the IBM i engineering team understand? For IBM users running on older IBM i OS levels, such as V4R4 or V5R2, the ability to read tapes from legacy servers and migrate to more modern IBM i OS is essential for a successful transition to cloud hosting.
3. Is the hosting provider an IBM Business Partner? I think this is important to mention. Hosting providers that are not IBM Business Partners are unaware of changes to IBM support and software. This can also mean the difference between transferring your IBM software to the hosting provider with related costs…or using the hosting provider’s IBM software with no extra expense to you. It can also mean the difference between getting IBM software phone support or a struggle to get a good answer.
4. What is provided in the IBM i hosting provider’s service? Of course you would expect an SSAE-16 class data center with safety, security and redundancy. But, will you be required to transfer your IBM licensed program products (compilers, Query, DB2 Query, Client Access, etc.) or does the provider include it with their service? Do you have a free 60-day test period to get a proof of concept of the service? How is backup handled? What resources (memory, storage and processer performance) are you assigned for your hosted virtual machine? What are your options for recovery and time to recovery?
5. What is the hosting provider’s service level really like? You can get a sense of this as it is expressed in the hosting agreement. You can get a sense of this from interviewing customers. You can also get first-hand experience from a free 60-day trial proof-of-concept.
6. Starting with the first call, does it sound like the cloud provider understands hosting and related technology? Do they understand your IBM i environment and your performance needs? Do they understand your system’s true performance instead of the rated speed which you probably never get? Do they understand networking to connect your users to your hosting environment? What provisions have they made for redundancy, security and continuity? Does the provider truly sound competent?
7. How long has the provider been in business? How many IBM i (OS400) clients do they support? How likely will the company stay in business?
8. How fair does the hosting agreement read? What provision do you have to terminate the arrangement if you are unhappy for any reason? Are there extra costs to leave before the term expires? When you read the agreement does it seem one-sided…in favor of the provider?
I think it is best to drill deeper to find talented experts that are easy to work with than pick a big company and hope for the best.
My purpose in highlighting these categories is they will help you in your search for the right talent.
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