Buffalo Supply Moves to Hosted Environment

Long time customer of ASI, Buffalo Supply, moved to a hosted environment for their business computing this spring.  ASI originally began working with Buffalo Supply in 2005 to implement SYSPRO in-house.  Since then, much has changed for Buffalo Supply, causing them to reconsider their IT environment and implement a hosted solution.
 
Buffalo Supply provides medical and surgical equipment to the federal government, and holds multiple FSS contracts.  Before moving to their hosted solution, Buffalo Supply maintained five servers in-house to fulfill their IT needs.  Each server would be replaced on a rotating basis so no server ever got to be too out of date.  With the downturn of the economy, cuts had to be made.  Buffalo Supply found themselves with aging servers, and it was time to act before those servers failed.
At this point, Buffalo Supply began to look at outsourcing their IT.  One very important factor was their SYSPRO ERP system.  When Buffalo Supply begain using SYSPRO, they invested in a significant custom piece of software from ASI.  That custom piece (along with SYSPRO) fits their needs, and is an investment they desired to protect.  Buffalo Supply looked to hosting vendors to protect their investment.
 
Aftercarefully considering their options, Buffalo Supply decided to use Application Solution Providers (ASP) in Longmont, CO.  ASP now provides Buffalo Supply with a three-layer server environment: a SQL server, a dedicated server for SYSPRO, and redundant application servers.  With this solution, the only hardware Buffalo Supply needs in-house are basic computers for its users to log in to the application servers hosted by ASP.  ASP provides backups and disaster recovery services, and provides a level of security that is far beyond what Buffalo Supply is able to achieve on its own.  ASP's facility provides fire protection, internet connection redundancies to ensure continuous connectivity, power grid redundancies, and enough fuel to power their backup generators for a week in the event of an emergency.
 
While these kinds of services to come at a significant cost, Buffalo Supply is still seeing significant savings.  Buffalo Supply doesn't have the manpower to maintain the kind of IT environment they require without hiring another person.  They are now comfortably living without the full-time IT employee they had before the cuts were made.  Eric Jackson, Vendor Specialist at Buffalo Supply, stated, "I now have two companies that I know can take care of Buffalo Supply if something should happen to me - ASI and ASP."  The cost of Buffalo Supply's hosting services are less than half the salary of a full-time IT person, and employees enjoy the added benefit of being able to login to their full desktops from any computer with an internet connection and being kept on the latest version of Microsoft Office.
 
During the move to the hosted environment, ASI was responsible for copying the existing SYSPRO setups to the new environment and working through the glitches caused by using a new type of environment.  ASI was able to help the project be a success by communicating and working well with ASP.  At the beginning of the year, Buffalo Supply and ASI scheduled an upgrade to SYSPRO Issue 10, Version 6.0, Service Pack 2 which Buffalo Supply had been requesting.  Because Buffalo Supply had moved to a hosted environment, they were able to enlist the help of ASP to create a separate set of server identical to those used in production so the upgrade could first be performed on the duplicate environment and thoroughly tested before applying the changes to the live environment.  ASI was instrumental in the testing and conversion of the upgraded system, and the thoroughness of the testing resulted in a nearly flawless upgrade.  Several employees at Buffalo Supply work exclusively in the custom portion of SYSPRO, and Eric Jackson observed, "Those employees didn't even notice we upgraded because nothing changed or went wrong.  That's how we knew we'd done a good job."
 
ASI is proud to call Buffalo Supply its first client to implement a hosted SYSPRO system.  The benefits they reap are numerous, and ASI is excited to continue assisting clients that desire to utilize a hosted solution.