cross-posted from here: http://www.ariasystems.com/thepit/
Recently, after 4 + years of using Aria for their customer management needs, our first customer Seawave (www.seawave.com) was acquired by one of their competitors: Globe Wireless, and has transitioned their billing to Globe’s existing system. This transition provides an excellent case study for those concerned with ownership and transition of customer data at the end of a commercial relationship. While it’s a bummer to lose such a great customer, transitioning data to another provider was an important step in Aria’s evolution and something to consider when analyzing mission critical SAAS applications.
After a few weeks of planning and coordination, we executed a “balance-forward” billing conversion and transitioned Seawave from our system to the internal Globe Wireless system. As a B2B service provider to the Marine industry, Seawave has very complex billing logic including over 400 different service rates and several layers of parent-child relationships. Adding to this complication, they also have a mix of payment methods including net terms invoicing (paper and electronic) and credit cards.
While Seawave owns the data, they don’t own or have access to our schema therefore, they had to do a bit of heavy lifting on their end to determine how to map the data and accounts to their new system. Inevitably, this will lead to a mismatch in functionality between the two systems, so compromises had to be made. The initial phase of the transition has been completed but because their business is seasonal, it will probably take a few cycles of close observation before its declared a success. We are providing them with “read only” access to the system, frozen in time after the transition period.
When considering an on-demand provider for mission critical functions, make sure you own the data and the provider has a plan and experience transitioning to other providers.
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