CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
2 February 2010
Product News
Online Tech and Campfire Interactive Sign Managed SaaS Hosting Agreement
Online Tech, Michigan’s largest managed data center operator, and Campfire Interactive, an Ann Arbor-based product lifecycle management (PLM) software firm, announced a partnership to deliver Campfire’s PLM solution on managed servers in Online Tech’s SAS-70 certified data centers.
Pradeep Seneviratne, President of Campfire Interactive, said “we are clearly seeing the growing trend towards Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) running on managed servers. Many of our customers are deploying our advanced Product Lifecycle Management tools but don’t want to manage the servers and infrastructure. We selected Online Tech as our managed hosting partner to deliver our Software through a SaaS model for our clients. This allows us to operate as a tightly integrated team, and helps us focus on the business solution, and know that the underlying infrastructure will be reliable and cost-effective.”
“Our relationship began by hosting Campfire’s solution for a Fortune 50 company on our managed servers” said Mike Klein, President of Online Tech. “The customer needed to deploy Campfire’s PLM solution quickly and they preferred a hosted solution with a simple monthly fee over the challenge of getting a new application approved and supported through their corporate IT department. The customer was deploying Campfire’s solution for a mission critical business process - worldwide strategic planning and sales forecasting. This meant that the deployment had to meet all of the global enterprise-scale security and reliability concerns of a Fortune 50 company. We met all the customer requirements and helped them accelerate their time to market and minimize their long term support costs by delivering the software on managed servers.”
Online Tech’s SAS-70 certification smoothed the way to getting corporate approval for a managed hosting solution in Online Tech’s data centers. SAS-70 is a nationally recognized audit standard for evaluating the process and security control procedures across the data center that is required by Sarbanes-Oxley. The SAS-70 designation demonstrates that the data center has the proper controls and procedures around physical and network security, environmental controls, system availability and performance and those controls have been followed consistently over time.
Following the successful first deployment, other Campfire customers have already taken advantage of this partnership to utilize Online Tech’s services. Based on these multiple customer success, Campfire and Online Tech have decided to formalize their partnership and offer the solution to Campfire’s entire customer base.
As part of the agreement, Campfire’s customers can host their PLM software on Online Tech’s managed servers located in their world-class Michigan data centers for a fraction of the cost of maintaining a full-fledged data center. This helps Campfire Interactive deliver its offerings across a broad range of vertical markets including Automotive, Chemical, Electronics and Semiconductors, and across a wide range of geographies. In addition, Campfire can now offer the convenience of hosting custom solutions for those clients who have unique needs.
About Campfire Interactive
Campfire Interactive, Inc (www.cfi2.com) specializes in easy-to-use, enterprise class Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software. Solutions offered by Campfire include sales forecasting, cost and price estimation, change cost management, engineering change management and project portfolio management. Campfire’s solutions span across financial, engineering, quality and timing information are used by thousands of users in medium-size, to Fortune 500 companies to identify, plan and develop their product portfolios.
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