In-house or hosted?

The application service provider (ASP) model has allowed businesses to outsource systems and processes that used to consume the efforts of management, tie down staff and divert financial resource.

Although the function is essential, putting effort into implementing and managing cataloguing, scheduling and transaction management systems is a distraction from other activities central to business development in the training industry, such as product development, sales and marketing.

ESP provides support for all the administrative processes involved in running a training-centre business without the usual overheads of implementation and support. By taking ESP's hosted ASP approach, training providers can expect to reduce implementation times and generate significant financial savings over comparable 'in-house' training administration systems.

The ASP model is now an accepted business strategy and Enterprise Study is the first company to bring the considerable benefits to UK training providers.

Return on investment

Of the many justifications for using ESP, perhaps the most compelling is the savings in costs and resources compared with other approaches.

With ESP there are no software licenses to buy, no annual maintenance and support contracts to pay, and no need to employ an IT department to develop or support the application. There are no servers to procure and no additional network resources to install.

For a medium-sized training company, the cost of implementing a typical mid-range in-house administration system is likely to be well excess of £100,000. For many, the full price tag taking into account the cost of IT staff, management time and other internal resources will be many times this figure. The ongoing cost of support and maintenance is also likely to be considerable.

With ESP, the up-front costs are minimal and the ongoing charges reasonable, giving much better cost of ownership figures overall.

In addition to the financial savings, the functionality provided by ESP brings the provision of managed training services within the reach of many training providers. This presents new opportunities for increased revenues, stronger customer relationships and significant new business growth.

Scalability

ESP is suitable for both small training operations and the very largest training providers, and anything in between. It can be used to handle the training administration for just one client or line of business, or for the entire company.

Indeed, large international training providers, single-site training companies and national, multi-site training suppliers are all currently using ESP.

Find out more – check out our users.

Technical Requirements

Essentially, all ESP requires is an Internet connection and a browser. Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher is recommended. As ESP runs in a hosted application service provider environment, you could run your business from the beach using a mobile phone and a laptop computer!

The advanced scheduling and resourcing screens make use of Microsoft proprietary JavaScript extensions. Microsoft Internet Explorer is therefore a requirement for users that need to access these areas of the application.

Security

User security

A comprehensive security package allows you to assign different access levels to different users, such as the operations manager, sales person, administrator, business manager and the customers' managers. Each level of user receives access to the ESP functions that are assigned to their job-role level.

Company security

The data and information relating to each training provider's ESP implementation is held secure from all other implementations on the system. Data uploaded into ESN is released to other training providers only as agreed with each customer. Enterprise Study places great importance on the confidentiality of the data held by our systems and takes great pains to secure that information.

Network security

The servers are protected by a firewall and all the latest security patches from the provider are applied promptly. There has never been any disruption to service caused by any malicious or other attack.

Physical security

The primary servers are secured in an underground, caged, level-1 secure facility, with full incident recovery and network-independent global access. The availability consistently outperforms network availability benchmarks 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.

Mission-Critical Protection

The service provided by ESP and ESN has been designed to provide the highest reliability and protection for the user so that it is safe to use the systems for mission-critical applications.

The servers are provided by Rackspace, one of the few Internet Service Providers who will contract Service Level Agreements. They have a reputation for very high reliability and availability, almost certainly greater than anything you could obtain in-house.

Should this service decline for whatever reason in the future, it would be possible to move to another service provider with minimal disruption to users.

Because the software is not run on Enterprise Study servers, the service would continue should anything befall the company. All contracts include escrow clauses so that the application software becomes available to the customer in the event of a cessation of trading.

Because of the nature of the company's rental income, should the company be taken over then it would be in the interest of the new owner to preserve and enhance the service.

In fact, ESP and ESN are probably more reliable than in-house systems with at least as much protection from risk as most other applications.