CAN I VIRTUALIZE YOUR GATEWAY ON MY SERVER?
- YES - Typical cost Ranges from $1,200 to $1,800 per machine or a flat $500 per machine if you have more than 1 location.
Technically we do not "officially support" virtual machines we can help you set them up if needed.
AVOID DUPLICATE P OINTS - IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN MACHINE RUNNING ON THE SAME NETWORK IT WILL RESULT IN DUPLICATE REWARD POINTS - THEREFOR YOU MUST TURN DOWN YOUR OLD MACHINE BEFORE TURNING THE NEW ONE ON.
WHY DO YOU CHARGE FOR THIS - Unlike our standard gateway units which are preconfigured and imaged to the point that we can grab them off the shelf and ship them we transfer this savings to you. Therefore if you buy a gateway machine we sell you this machine for the same cost that we pay for the machine. There is no mark up at all, so we do not charge you for any of the time and energy spent in prepping and sending you one of our standard machines. However, if your wanting a custom solution such as virtual machine then this requires us to bring in higher level staff which are typically involved on other paid IT related projects. At this point you now switching from the business model of"SaaS (software as a service)" to more of a traditional IT consulting model. This involves a group of-people internally within our company called "The Dev Team" which is made up of network engineers, pc support specialist, software developers and project managers. All of whom are working on other projects and would need to be pulled off these projects to help you build your virtual machine vs our hardware products just pull off the shelf and ship therefore we only charge you our cost.
HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO VIRTUALIZE A MACHINE - Chances are you are paying your current IT company to come in and build a virtual machine there your paying then. Plus your thing going to need to pay us to review and test the setup. Takes on average around 8 to 10 hours per virtual machine. We currently bill this team of people at the rate of $120 hr to $150 hr depending on if we have to bring in our software developers or not. Our network folks are $120 while software is $150. This puts the cost typically between $1,200 to $1,800 on average per virtual machine that is needed to setup. If you have more than one location will provide you a virtual machine support for a flat $500 per machine you setup in an effort to save you money. Keep in mind that you still will setup a blank copy of windows and install our remote management software without us, then once that is done we can remote control in and fix the machine.
CAN I INSTALL MONITORS / ANTIVIRUS / OTHER SOFTWARE ON THE MACHINE - No this is not supported
YOU ALSO WAIVE ALL MONITORING AND SUPPORT - When your on a virtual machine you also sign a waiver stating that you wave us from monitoring it and you are 100% responsible for making sure that machine is always online and operational.
OTHER REASON WHY WE TRY TO AVOID THIS :
- KEEPING HARDWARE SETUP COST LOW
We strive to keep the replacement hardware cost of our data gateways less than $500. Which does not even cover all of the software license costs. I - KEEPING DRIVE SIZE COSTS LOW
Because rewards data updates frequently we require the use of SSD drive. Also, a lot of data is transferred on these drives therefore we the drive size needs to be larger than normal. This drives the costs up of the hardware. Windows 10 will automatically download "updates" and store them on the drive using up a lot of those drive space. So we make sure it runs well we need to buy a larger SSD drive which drives the cost of the unit up. This can easily add $100 to the priced of the actual hardware. - KEEPING WINDOWS SOFTWARE LICENSE LOW
Unlike pasts versions of windows which you can purchase an enterprise license for windows 10 and higher requires a different kind of licensing. This kind of licensing is more expensive than the licenses of the past. While the retail version for general use is cheaper, enterprise versions for business are more expensive. Therefore it drives the cost of the software license up. It also requires additional management licenses beyond windows which are included in earlier versions at no cost. - KEEPING ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE LICENSE LOW
There are certain other bits of software that need to be licensed to make this work, when you move to windows 10 you have to pay for some of this additional license that is included for free with earlier versions of windows. - KEEPING THE MONTHLY OPERATIONAL COSTS LOW
There are several popular dealer systems on the market that do not support interfacing a windows 10 computer to it. As soon as you try to do this they then increase their license cost because you are using windows 10. So the monthly operational costs now then increase as well. - KEEP THE REPLACEMENT AND SETUP TIME LOW
Every windows machine is based on a drive image so when it is time to the setup we can simply build a computer in less than 30 minutes. Windows 10 has introduced a different kind of drive imaging which requires a different kind of imaging software. So this means that it can take up to 4 hours to image a computer and ship it compared to 30 minutes in the past. So if your gateway breaks and needs to be replaced it takes us longer to get you one with windows 10. - KEEP THE CUSTOMER SERVICE COSTS LOW
We would need to provide additional training for the staff and our customers surrounding this windows 10 system which means additional training manuals, materials, internal classes, and more. - SOME VERSIONS OF DEALER SYSTEMS WON'T WORK
There are some dealer systems that just do not support windows 10 clients. So when they detect you are using windows 10 they will deny the requests. This is because they want you to pay for a more expensive data interface to their data, if we did this it would drive the monthly cost up and there would be the additional value provided.