Infrastructure as a Service

Readers of this blog have, from day one, understood our interest and enthusiasm over software as a service, or SaaS. Well, we are just finishing up an implementation with a company in Indianapolis called BlueLock who brings a new concept to market: Infrastructure as a Service.

They have a video, you can check it out here, that explains their approach. The one thing that really struck me watching it was their COO Pat O'Day stating that when companies build their own on-site infrastructure they often have to give something up. In order to meet timeline and budget requirements they might have to give up security or compliance. BlueLock's approach is to build infrastructure requirements quickly but because they house the necessary inventory of hardware and software, they can meet challenging timelines without giving up other values, like security.

Soon after I had the opportunity to talk to BlueLock's CEO John Qualls I knew I wanted to be a part of this company's future. The team, as a whole, is old enough to have the needed experience and young enough to have the entrepreneurial spirit.

The NetSuite implementation was an interesting one, to be sure. We are just now putting the finishing touches on it but I would like to mention a couple of key points which distinguish this project from all others:

1. It took a bit to wrap our mind around the business model but we finally understood that BlueLock sells services provide through their inventory of hardware and software. What we finally ended up with was Item Groups for the services - this allowed several services to be bundled together for clarity of presentation, while still charging their revenue and cost of services sold to separate accounts.
2. Building the data center was a separate challenge. For this we created inventory items of all the base hardware and software components. Then we built assembly items from the base components. This approach enables BlueLock to order the hardware and software that they need and bring it into inventory.
3. When BlueLock signs a contract with a client, they generate a sales order with the services that the client needs. We added a custom field for months and a javascript that converts the amount from a single month to the length of the contract. And using NetSuite Advanced Billing module we can create the necessary invoice each month, for the length of the contract.
4. On the operations side, a new contract means that they build assemblies of hardware and software. This moves the inventory form offline to production and gives the management team a good way to monitor inventory available as new clients come on board.
5. The Customer Support module is in use also. Online and email cases enable customers to communicate quickly and easily with operations. We also added a new Tab to the Sales Order so that as soon as a client sign an Order, the salesperson can generate a Provisioning Case to operations, alerting them that a new environment has been sold. Operations responds by building their assemblies and putting the new environment online. Meanwhile, management monitors hardware and software inventory against the pipeline and decides when purchase orders need to go out.

NetSuite was a good choice for BlueLock. Before the end of this year they will have several other data centers opened. They will be able to manage all of these locations with a single application. With CRM, Marketing, Accounting, Inventory and Customer Support, they can see and manage the entire client experience in a single application.