When one looks at the Professional Services sector, it is made up of a few large international enterprises and then lots of SMEs. This means that for a large number of organisations they have no IT departments per se, but at the same time make extensive use of IT systems to make everyday tasks easier and quicker. The introduction of cloud computing provides an opportunity for these sort of companies, with more cost-effective ways of introducing new technology to support the collaborative and agile world we now live in.
I recently came across a new company, Lucey Technology, that has built a set of services to provide online payment, file sharing, collaboration capabilities, communications and online communities. The product, called Online Customer Engagement (OCE), is aimed at providing professional services SMEs with the ability to make effective and better use of the web to engage with their customers. Before we look at the product in more detail, who are Lucey Technology?
The company, based in Dublin, has 17 employees at the time of writing and already have over 100 customers for OCE and climbing rapidly. Ian Lucey who is their CEO, has a number of years experience selling software to accountants, working for companies such as Relate Software, and Sage. Niall Moran, who is their head of development, previously worked for one of Ireland’s largest Microsoft SharePoint practice. I borrowed their viral marketing campaign title for part of the title of this article.
So what does OCE do? Well OCE combines into a single offering the following Microsoft products: SharePoint, Windows Live, Great Plains and MSN, with custom development to provide Customer Interaction services over the internet. All the customer sees is Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Through these familiar user interfaces, the user is provided with a personalised workspace for business and personal content, which they can access anywhere without VPN access. In terms of payments, these are processed behind the scenes at Lucey’s data centre using Microsoft Great Plains and the payment service is provided by Realex Payments. Lucey have negotiated a rate of 1.24% for its customers to accept payment online which is significantly cheaper than rates charged elsewhere and is one of OCE’s major differentiators.
256 Bit encryption comes as standard for all customers. Use of VeriSign and Microsoft Passport password further enhances the security of the data and transactions carried out over the internet. Lucey Technology have set up a number of partnerships with data centre providers so they cover UK and Eire, mainland Europe, East Coast USA and West Coast USA. These data centers provide 9 layers of data security and are CyberTrust certified with secure access via SSL. They all operate ITIL/MOF operational practices and provide 24x7x365 support, backed by 99.9% uptime SLA.
OCE is available in 2 “editions”: Standard and Dedicated. Standard provides a user with a single architecture for multiple customers with no seat limit and a focus on cost efficiency. Lucey Technology reckon that this is aimed at about 98% of their customers. With Dedicated, the customer has their own architecture instance. It is aimed at businesses that are likely to have more than 500 users and is optimised for 2000+. The service is provided by Lucey Technology’s partners.
I talked earlier about the cost of the service being a big differential. Well let’s look at what is involved. The starting price is £8/month; this breaks down as follows: £4 per every registered staff member per month and £4 per gigabyte per month. For this you get these standard features:
- 256 Bit encryption
- No limit to the number of customers a business can invite to work with OCE
- No additional cost for administrators.
- Email and online support are included free as well the use of an interactive media player called Lucey.TV.
- No advertising
- Access and context to use the free Microsoft Windows Live Services
Additional services are available for extra cost. These include:
- Ability to process online payments for an extra €20 per month
- Support for the use of digital signatures so as to sign-off documents for €10 per month
- Phone support (email and online support are included free) is available
- Disaster Recovery back‐up depends on file size
I am very impressed with what I have seen and heard about this offering. It seems to answer many of the questions that SMEs have about using cloud services, particularly security. OCE has combined the familiarity of Microsoft technologies to provide a business context that matches many professional services firms’ requirements.
