Going local?
One of the questions I hear quite often when I speak about our software to IT people representing potential customers is: 'can we install it locally?' I imagine that this is a question that can make any 'software as a service' vendor squirm and hesitate. I have certainly done so myself. So for future reference, here's my best answer to the question:
It is possible, but...
this is why you should strongly consider a service based model:
- Look at all the successful social networking software that has dominated the net for the last couple of years. Youtube. Flickr. Del.ici.ous. Myspace. Digg. What do they have in common? They all greatly benefit (both financial and in functionality) from being centrally hosted. The future of the learning platform is to combine it's enterprise solutions with community services using tricks from social networking software. Ergo is the future of the learning platform a hosted solution.
- A learning platform is a high availability, 24/7 platform that needs being looked after around the clock, weekends and bank holidays. It requires special competence and expensive hardware solutions. Leave the technical difficulties to a 3rd party and keep the focus on the pedagogical implementation.
2 comments:
Ja..ja...
Alt på en server er sikkert kjekt for leverandørene, men ikke så greit for brukerne når hele serveren går i sirup etter en sentral oppgradering. Ved lanseringen av versjon 3.1 måtte hele Utdanningsnorge vente på at serveren skal komme opp igjen.
A brief summary for any readers not fluent in Norwegian: This comment points out that last upgrade of our software/service our customers experienced a very unwelcome day of downtime. The comment suggests that perhaps a service oriented model only suits the vendor themselves.
I expected this. And it is fair to raise the question after such an unfortunate episode. It should not have happened, and if it was typical of the service we provided we would have been out of business a long time ago. We sucked and have to improve.
But ask yourself this; how often have you experienced that local infrastructure has downtime? How often is your e-mail server down? Network? I am convised that there would not be any learning platforms at all if they wasn't so tightly connected with a hosted solution - it has been key to the large uptake of the learning platform in the university sector. It would simply have been to expensive and to complex if everybody should have installed their own learning platform.
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