Computer Guidance Lands First Hosted Customer for Construction App

October 20, 2009 Alex Woodie

Computer Guidance has landed its first customer for the application hosting service it announced in May. Republic Investment Services, a real estate management company based in Arizona, selected the hosted i OS software due to the promise of a quick implementation with low upfront IT costs and the capability to scale usage as needed.

Computer Guidance partnered with IBM server distributor and fellow Arizona company Avnet in the roll-out of its eCMS hosting service earlier this year. As part of the deal, Tempe-based Avnet supplies the data center and System i hardware, while Scottsdale-based Computer Guidance provides the IT personnel and expertise to manage and run eCMS.

All the folks at Republic Investment Services have to do is use the software and its accounting and project management capabilities, as opposed to managing the software and the underlying server environment. That works fine for Betty Wagner, director of operations for the small, Phoenix-based company.

“On-demand and ubiquitous access to an all-encompassing construction management solution without the need for a comprehensive IT infrastructure is what we were looking for,” Wagner says. The hosted offering “provides the tools we need to manage our business on a daily basis with reduced upfront IT expenditures. We chose the usage-based model as it scales up and down as our business demands it.”

Avnet and Computer Guidance also offer disaster recovery and high availability services through Avnet’s level IV data center. The service, which it launched this spring, is available to both its new software as a service (SaaS) customers, as well as traditional customers that run eCMS on their own hardware.

There are only two-and-a-half months left in the year, but Computer Guidance CEO Roger Kirk indicated that the company is not done launching innovative new services. “Hosted eCMS is just one of the many innovative solutions that we are introducing to the marketplace in 2009,” he says.