Originally published on MSPmentor – March 10, 2010
Not every MSP can leverage the Google Apps Marketplace, and not every solutions provider has cloud applications ready to go. Enter AppsOnCommand, a new white label solution that lets you host any application and deliver it as software as a service (SaaS).
According to AppsOnCommand’s website, they can host any Windows application — among the examples given are Microsoft Office and Quickbooks — and make it accessible to a client through a “generic” website branded with your logo. You handle billing; they handle backups, monitoring, and management.
Like all browser-based SaaS applications, AppsOnCommand is more-or-less platform independent: an iPhone can log in as well as someone running Ubuntu. They say that once the software is hosted, they have no contact whatsoever with the client: the MSP handles basic support, escalating complex issues to AppsOnCommand as needed.
If it works as advertised, this is a good solution for smaller providers who want to offer the flexibility and scalability of SaaS but have customers who rely on a few key Windows applications.
The trade-off, of course, for that lack of complexity is that they can’t offer the same scale or scope of applications as Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, or the aforementioned Google Apps Marketplace. But if you’re dealing with a small business, how big it scales doesn’t matter nearly as much as how well it works.
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