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Interview with a Tensoft Co-founder: Philosophy, Technology, and Customer Service.

William White is Tensoft’s Chief Technical Officer and one of its co-founders. He oversees technical development at Tensoft, but also stays close to Tensoft’s customer base through involvement with implementations and support. Recently, Tensoft’s Director of Business Development, Caprice Murray, had an opportunity to interview William, during filming for a corporate video.

MURRAY: What is Tensoft’s philosophy on customer service?
WHITE: We see ourselves as partners with our customers, providing a total solution for our customers is a big part of it. We engage with the customer, we demonstrate our technical knowledge and capabilities. Oftentimes we become a trusted partner that they rely on outside of the scope of our initial project. Our customers know that if they give us a project to work on, that we will take it and successfully complete it.

MURRAY: What are some of the most important technology decisions that have been made during Tensoft FSM’s development?
WHITE: FSM has been around since the year 2000, so it’s evolved a lot over the years. But the core foundation of FSM is very solid. We spent a lot of time with the initial design, developing the data architecture and structure in a way that was scalable and could grow as we needed to add new features. For specific technology, we selected technology that is scalable and robust, so a customer could start off with five users, having a very simple infrastructure, and as the company grows and succeeds, they could add servers, additional capabilities. The FSM application grows with them. The product is very cost-effective to get in, and the incremental cost to upgrade is also very cost-effective for our customers.

MURRAY: How does Tensoft ensure that Tensoft FSM can keep up with new versions of Microsoft Great Plains?
WHITE: FSM was designed to allow for an easy upgrade path with Great Plains. This goes back to the initial design of FSM. We isolated the integration points with the ERP system. It is designed in a way that an upgrade from one version to the next typically takes about a half a day. In general, that is validating the data interfaces that exist and then testing. Instead of writing custom interfaces for the data integration, we use the integration tool that comes with Microsoft Dynamics. That tool does the business logic validation for the data records being imported into Great Plains. On top of that, in FSM, we have additional logic that does a pre-check of the data and stages it for the customer, so the customer knows in advance of trying to integrate that additional setup is required. When the data has been transferred to Great Plains, if there’s a problem, FSM will then validate that the records were successfully transferred. Anything that’s not successfully transferred will be rolled back and made available to the customer again. The problem that caused the data migration failure will be identified.

Typically we get a release of Great Plains in advance of our customers. We’ll have the development work and any changes for FSM completed before the customer gets it. So, at that point, it’s just a matter of scheduling resources and reviewing the enhancements that have been made to both Great Plains and FSM to know exactly what they’re going to get with the new release.

MURRAY: Can you describe Tensoft’s hosting environment for FSM and Great Plains?
WHITE: Tensoft has a hosting environment, a carry-across data facility. The physical environment provides multiple OC12 connections to an OC192 backbone. It has redundant power, including a diesel backup generator. It has both physical security, as well as video monitoring for 24/7 security. It also provides network monitoring, so the hosting environment itself provides for high availability and uptime. The network architecture for the Tensoft hosting environment is a key component of our success – a highly available environment that provides high-performance for our customers. The architecture was designed in a way that we have a secure gateway on the front end, so all the interfaces between the customer and the data is secure. Behind the secure gateway, we have Citrix farm that has servers for both load balancing and redundancy – again, high availability and high performance is the ultimate goal.

For our database servers, they’re also the multiprocessor servers, running Microsoft SQL Server 2005 product. This enables high availability, and can be scaled to customer needs. Access to the Tensoft FSM application and Tensoft Analytics – in addition to Microsoft Business Portal Application – is provided through an authenticated connection over an SSL connection to those servers.

MURRAY: For those companies where hosting makes sense – usually start-ups, or companies that currently don’t have their in-house IT staff and infrastructure - what are some of the benefits of hosting with Tensoft?
WHITE: There are many benefits of hosting with Tensoft. One of the primary benefits we have for our customers is very quick up-time. When they select Tensoft for hosting their ERP solution and FSM, we have a methodology to bring their system up in a very short period of time. They don’t have to go procure equipment, get the server configured, and worry about all the other things that deal with building out their own servers. We have all the servers in place, the technology in place to support them. We provide a great interface using Citrix as a front-end, so it’s one click and they can be anywhere in the world and access applications through a secure authenticated connection. To reiterate, the primary things are uptime, performance, ease-of-use, and a lower cost to get in.

MURRAY: Can you talk about an FSM customer success story that you have been particularly happy about?
WHITE: Probably the most recent example of an FSM success story that comes to mind is one that we completed at the end of 2005. We had a customer that engaged us at the very end of Q3 of 2005. They had a vision of a go-live on both Great Plains and Tensoft FSM on New Year’s Day – less than 3 months away. We put the implementation team in place, and put a project plan together. We partnered with the customer – that’s the only way to do an implementation like this, on such a short time frame. We partnered with their finance and operations team. Our implementation team put in extra time during the holiday hours. We were able to help this customer meet their go live deadline in ten weeks, which is a pretty tight time frame – especially given the holidays.

MURRAY: That’s great! Thanks so much for your time today.

For further information, please contact Caprice Murray, Tensoft Director of Business Development, at 888-450-4030 x406 or at caprice@tensoft.com