GuildQuality has collaborated with TourBuzz to produce a day long roundtable for Atlanta SaaS companies. So far GuildQuality, TourBuzz, bigWebApps and a few other SaaS companies will be present on the first SaaS Day Atlanta. bigWebApps is looking forward to this great opportunity and is excited to meet local SaaS companies.

Here’s the application form for more details:

“Atlanta startups that have reached product/market fit and are trying to take their business to the next level face a tremendous number of challenging decisions. While our local startup community has matured immensely over the past several years, most of these efforts have been focused on the earlier phase of nurturing an idea into a viable product.

For those startups that have made the transition to operating companies, you understand the daily struggle with issues like hiring, company organization, building culture, expanding sales, managing technology, strategic positioning, fundraising, planning for exit, and many other areas. Each of these topic areas are complicated and demand attention and wisdom to navigate successfully, both of which are in limited supply in your growing business.

Over the past year, Alan and Paul from TourBuzz spent a great deal of time with Geoff and Mark of GuildQuality discussing the challenges of growing our Software-as-a-service companies. We had some incredibly productive discussions and come to the realization that if we can expand this dynamic to other similarly-sized Software-as-a-service startups in Atlanta, we could all vastly improve our business execution.

To that end, we would like to announce the first Software-as-a-service Day Atlanta, tentatively scheduled for October 20th, 2011. This will be a semi-public full-day event focused on sharing experience and wisdom to improve all participating companies.

Software-as-a-service day is not intended to supplant other great local entrepreneur programs like ATDC, EO or Flashpoint but rather complement them by offering a unique environment for a diverse set of companies that share similar business models and problems to help each other come up with creative, effective solutions.

Software-as-a-service Day participants can expect not only to find solace in meeting others with similar struggles, but also develop relationships and get exposure to a broad array of ideas for attacking these problems. The program will also provide an opportunity to benchmark your own performance against peer companies and encourage all of us to improve our performance.

Anyone can apply, though the first event will be limited to 8 companies. This keeps the group small enough so that we can establish rapport and have frank conversation. If there is enough interest, we would love to help additional groups of companies create their own Software-as-a-service day.

Applicants must meet strict qualifications to participate, including:

- Software-as-a-service business model
- $250k in trailing-twelve-months revenue
- Based in Atlanta

So what will actually happen on SAAS Day? Each participant will give a brief presentation about their company, explain their market, share to-date progress, and point out their biggest challenges. Afterward, a series of discussions about specific topics will provide the opportunity to learn and share. We anticipate that the event will be so useful that our cohort of companies will want to have periodic follow-on events to continue the conversation.

Software-as-a-service day will take place from 9-4:30 in Midtown. We’ll break up the day with a dutch lunch and wrap up the meeting with more discussion. We’ll also have drinks and appetizers in the evening, and would love to have other members of your team and (especially) your significant others join us.”

Click here to apply

Hope to see you there!

For some of our team members, this was their first race. We are waiting on the results to see if our CEO, Patrick, had the fastest running time against other male CEOs. Either way, everyone survived the race, accomplished their finish time goal and had a great time. Check out some of our pictures below.

While we are planning our next company race, check out more race photos on our facebook

What a great adventure CRM Idol 2011 has been for bigWebApps HelpDesk. We have had the opportunity to meet new people and learn new things. After our presentation last Friday, our review was posted. It was encouraging and gave us helpful insight on how to be #1. During the presentation, the judges commended us on the way we think about our customers.

We as a team like to provide ongoing customer service and give our customers the extra attention they deserve. Since after all, we are a Help Desk that’s helpful. They highlighted our key features and gave us the advice to not settle for #2. Beyond CRM Idol, with our positive attitude, they want to see us succeed. That kind of statement is always encouraging.

The CRM Idol semi-finalists were released yesterday. The semi-finalists are: Aplicor, Assistly, CrowdFactory, FuzeDigital, GetStatisfaction, GreenRope CRM, JaguarTPM, Nimble, RO|Innovation, SalesNexus, Soluciones SA, Stone Cobra and thedatabank.

In addition to the 13 semi-finalists, the judges decided to call out 3 companies for special recognition. While they didn’t make the semi-finalists this year, the judges noticed them as being something special and worthy of their and our attention. They will be watching them.

The Judges Attention Award Winners for 2001 are: AddressTwo, bigWebApps and Vertical Solutions Inc.

As you can see, we are proud winners of the Judges Attention Award! We are proud to wear and share that crown with AddressTwo and Vertical Solutions Inc. Like we said before, CRM Idol has been a great experience and we are thrilled to participate next year.

We would like to congratulate all of the semi-finalists and best of luck to each and every one of them. But most of all we would like to thank the judges for their time and special attention to each contestant. We will be keeping a close eye on the competition throughout.

Good luck everyone. See you at CRM Idol 2012.

Check out more information on the competition here: http://www.crmidol.com/

As most of you know bigWebApps HelpDesk is a contestant in the first CRM Idol competition. We had our presentation last Friday on August 26 that went great. We got to spend one hour showing the judges all about bigWebApps HelpDesk. After the presentation, the judges collaborated and wrote a review about what they thought. The review can be found here http://www.crmidol.com/reviews/bigwebapps.

Patrick, CEO,“thought the review was fair and well thought out. It’s really impressive the amount of attention the judges give to each of the contestants and the level of feedback they give. Kudos to them. Even though we are ok with the idea of being #2 (which this market is plenty big and #2 would be fantastic) we will always strive to be the best solution for our customers. Sometimes focusing on just being #1 can cause you to lose that sight.”

Overall we are very pleased to have had this opportunity to be in front of these important people and receive their feedback. We appreciate the time and thought the judges have given to each and every contestant.

Now that all of the Americas contestants have completed their presentations, we cannot wait for the announcement of the semi-finalists! Look for the announcement this week. Good luck to everyone.

At bigWebApps we know nothing would be possible without our clients. This is why we would like to put our customers in the spotlight every chance we get. This time we would like to shine the light on Kevin Dailey of Unified Physical Security.

Kevin Dailey, President, formed Unified Physical Security in 2009. He has had quite an extensive past in technology working with companies such as HP, MTI, Fiberlink Communications Corporations, T-RAX Systems, IBM, among a few others. Unified Physical Security is one of the few organizations with an IT heritage and a focus on today’s Physical Security challenges. They utilize a layered approach to prevent physical intrusion and protect assets (physical and intellectual) from leaving the controlled area. Their integrated approach leveraging technology for the purpose of enhancing security provides corporate security a new set of tools that are not offered by traditional security integrators.

This is what Kevin has to say about bigWebApps HelpDesk:

“We are using the bigWebApps platform to consolidate multiple technical resources outside my company to supplement our internal Engineering resources.  Our customers are looking for Managed Services, 7 x 24 x 365.  Without substantial investment in four to six more external engineers to cover the demands of a 24 hour coverage window I can’t meet that requirement.  Our “follow the sun” model allows us to leverage overseas resources to supplement our own coverage.  Our customers will no longer feel that their coverage stops at 5PM.  In a Level 1 Critical outage the instantaneous routing of a ticket to the right resource allows us to deliver a 15 minute SLA, better than many of the largest organizations in the country.

We utilize our bigWebApps HelpDesk portal to route the call to the proper resource according to support call required type and the customer is able to classify the criticality of the ticket when the ticket is opened. The ticket can be anything from a critical network outage, to a limited scope problem, to just a question.  Each is handled according to a different Sea-level so we work on a self-policing model with our customers. Effectively, the ticket is as critical as they think it is, not as critical as we think it is.  The system allows us to track the time of the resources utilized, as well as measure time-to-resolution for SLA delivery measurements. We give our partners access to the same system so there is never a question about billing, connectivity or availability – it’s one platform to solve all the problems.   This single platform results in us focusing on one thing – solving the customer’s technical issue as fast as possible at a more cost effective rate than the major players.

The system tracks problem ownership and communication threads throughout each ticket’s resolution, thereby creating a NO EXCUSES mentality internally.  Any updates come right through the systems email and keeps us apprised of any special needs along the way.  We also track each customer’s assets internally so the information is at the engineer’s fingertips when needed.

bigWebApps has been very helpful in customizing the system to help me achieve my operational goals.  I looked at several systems before choosing bigWebApps HelpDesk, but found little flexibility in the larger organizations.  bigWebApps has been focused on helping me achieve my operational goals from the start, not on how to modify my process to fit their platform.  I decided that I need a partner more than a piece of software and bigWebApps has delivered consistently since the start of our relationship.”

bigWebApps HelpDesk is proud to announce that we are competing to become the first CRM Idol. I know what you may be thinking, and no we are not going to serenade anyone. You will thank us later for that.

CRM Idol is a competition developed by Paul Greenberg that involves forty companies from the Americas and twenty companies from EMEA (which includes Europe, the Middle East and Africa). Paul Greenburg is considered one of CRM’s leading authorities on strategy and on the state of the market. Needless to say he is an expert on the subject of CRM.

This competition is going to allow us to show off bigWebApps HelpDesk to a panel of people who on a normal day are hard to get in touch with. This panel is equivalent to the American Idol judges in the CRM world.

Here is the quick breakdown of what we have got ourselves into:

1. We have one hour on August 26th to present bigWebApps HelpDesk to the judges.

2. Then after the demo the judges will collaborate and write a review. This review will then be published in multiple venues. This review can be good, bad or mixed.

During this process all contestants have been granted a mentor to help them develop their presentation. As of now we are working out all the loose ends and adding the final touches to prepare for next Friday. The bigWebApps Team is very excited for what is to come. Come check out our contestant page, read the contest rules and view the other competitors at http://www.crmidol.com

Good luck to everyone!

Atlanta, July 25, 2011 –bigWebApps HelpDesk, web-based help desk software, is now a member of NetworkedHelpDesk.org, an open API that creates a seamless communication stream among multiple partners and suppliers to deliver an awesome customer experience. Organizations manage a variety of systems that are spread across multiple partners, suppliers and departments that perform tasks such as project management, customer relationship management, and customer support.

NetworkedHelpDesk.org allows these diverse systems to join and connect for flawless collaboration. Before the development of this open standard, consumer quality collaboration across multiple organizations and systems was expensive and complicated. With this open business API standard, organizations and systems can enable a flawless support channel across multiple platforms that cooperate around tickets, business processes and organizational workflows.

“Joining Networked Help Desk’s initiative made sense to us”, said Patrick Clements CEO and co-founder of bigWebApps. “We no longer want to be a solution that is just on the web, but rather we want to be a part of the web. We want to continue to provide our users with the ability to provide the best possible support services to their customers. Allowing them the flexibility to move data in and out of complimentary solutions is the ‘no brainer’ in today’s application world. Linking up with Networked Help Desk and adopting their APIs is a good start in the right direction.”

NetworkedHelpDesk.org founding members include: Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, PagerDuty, Pivotal Tracker, Service Now, SugarCRM and Zendesk. Cloud-based software developers that develop products such as ticketing systems, bug trackers, knowledge bases, customer relationship management software, and more, are invited to join. To learn more visit NetworkedHelpDesk.org. 

About bigWebApps HelpDesk

bigWebApps is an Atlanta based software development company which offers an integrated application suite of help desk, asset management, and parts inventory to SMB and government based organizations. bigWebApps HelpDesk provides a SaaS solution assisting help desk teams and personal service firms in providing personalized support for their customer’s needs.

For more information, call 866.996.1200, email sales@bigwebapps.com, or visit http://helpdesk.bigwebapps.com

As most of you know we have been in the process of renovating our office. We had to move to a rather “rustic” temporary office for a few weeks while the renovation was completed. As Henry Ford said we all came together, kept it together and successfully worked together throughout this process. We have been living out of boxes, covered in dust and anxious to move back into our office. Finally that time has come. We are back in our office and eager to successfully knock out the rest of this year.

We are still in the process of trying to decorate and beautify the place, but we still have fun along the way. We hold weekly furniture voting sessions that sometimes end in five different votes. Eventually we will have all of the final pieces in place. But in the meantime we are back in business people! Check out the new bigWebApps Office.

The New Kitchen:

View down hallway with everyone’s office:

The concrete floors:

Lounge Area:

Conference Room:

Office:

Of course there is more to see but you will have to come visit us to get the full tour. Check back for updates when we add all of the final touches. Needless to say we are all very pleased with the new office and happy to be back!

Today, in our continuing series on the asset life cycle, we are going to cover the first step of the cycle, design. Of course the initial step of any asset life cycle is to first determine the need for an asset. Once this need is determined, the design process begins. Every asset development project will have a varying number of phases, but for our illustration I will lump them all in to five categories.

The 5 Phases of the Design

1. Discovery
2. Definition / Scope
3. Engineering / Design
4. Construction / Procurement
5. Deployment

Phase 1 – Discovery

The discovery phase is what starts the entire process. It includes all of the discussions, thought, and exploration that lead to the moment when you realize you need to provide a new asset to fill a need within your business. The phase ends with your decision to move forward with a project.

Phase 2 – Definition / Scope

This is the most critical phase in any design process. In this phase all of the requirements that the new asset needs to meet are clearly defined. This provides a defined project scope and puts metrics in place by which the success of the total project is measured. This is also where budgets get determined and project costs are estimated. Upon collecting all of this research, the decision is made to either move to next phase or kill the project.

Phase 3 – Engineering / Design

In this phase designers and engineers are commissioned to draw up schematics based on the defined requirements. The project end goals are clearly solidified and initial conflicts with in the projects are resolved (i.e. ongoing maintenance cost estimates, physical placement of the assets, and project start and finish dates). This phase ends when you agree to the plans that will guide construction

Phase 4 – Construction / Procurement

The contractor or vendor who will build your asset becomes the most active member of the team during this phase. Investments are made in materials, and timetables are extremely important. Good communication within the project team is critical, as the need for changes often arises. This is typically the time of highest stress for the project owner.

Phase 5 – Deployment

This phase beings the day the project is up and running and never really ends. It’s where you begin to measure the success of the asset against the pre-determined project objectives. If you are turning over the project to others who will ultimately use it, good communication during that process is important. Your engineer or designer can help ensure that the terms of any contracts were met. You can use the experience of this project to improve the process of future work. This phase leads directly into the next step in the asset life cycle, commissioning.

The earlier a holistic approach is adopted in the life cycle process, the easier it will be in subsequent steps. The design is the first step in creating a successful project.

In our next article in the asset life cycle management series we’ll cover commissioning.

Helpdesk by bigWebApps has developed a system that meets all of the needs for your asset management life cycle as well as make existing system integration simple, no matter what existing measures you have in place. Our Helpdesk system is a web based, meaning you’ll have access to all of your information wherever you have an internet connection. Our Software as a Service (SaaS) provides you with instant system set up and deployment.

Browse our site for more information: http://helpdesk.bigwebapps.com

Asset management is a discipline which gives accountability to the way organizations decide:

• how, where and in what to invest
• what assets are most critical
• what risks need to be managed.
• what demands must be served
• how knowledge should be captured and disseminated
• how actual performance should be measured
• what improvements are needed.

Processes are designed to bring these and many other decisions into a plan to make sure their use serves the organization’s objectives. Managing the assets of any organization needs to have a holistic and integrative approach, from their inception through to their disposal in what is called an Asset Life Cycle.

Asset management is a process, not an instant solution. It gives you a channel to achieve your goals but only if you define them first – most organizations do not operate just to become good at managing assets. Asset Management can help you integrate information systems, technical resources and human capabilities into a focused, long-term pursuit of your objectives but only if you are clear about what these objectives are and understand their implications. Asset management is not something new, but rather a new way of taking several disciplines, meshing them together and creating a whole system around proven principles of cost, risk and sustainable performance.

There has never been a better time for the life cycle management of physical assets to enter mainstream thinking. Organizations depend on the availability and condition of physical assets to determine if they are going to succeed or fail, based on their ability to properly manage them efficiently and sustainably with less and less access to resources. Everyone’s definition of success may vary, but the overall goals will be the same:

• spend less to get more
• leave assets in the same state as you would wish to find them
• manage risks not resources
• think about system as a whole and not just their parts
• The return on investment in physical assets could be more profitable delivery of services
• the contributions their condition makes to maintenance and operational costs
• how long-term planning reduces capital and operational expenditure
• how healthy they are when handed over to the next generation
• how historical decline in their condition is halted or reversed

A company’s physical inventory includes all items such as office furniture, computers, artwork, appliances, office electronics and IT equipment. Managing these physical assets can be a complex logistical challenge. However, this function is vital to the daily functioning of any organization. Larger companies for example, may possess inventories that consist of tens of thousands of items. With the advent of computerized asset management systems, facility and office managers now have the tools to manage inventories more efficiently.

Asset management programs save a significant amount of time. Large companies have tremendous amounts of new and used furniture, equipment, etc., that they need to inventory, store and manage. Some systems operate using simple, but accurate bar codes and handheld, battery-powered bar code scanners to identify and track each item. This drastically reduces the time it would take to do a manual inventory and to input data directly into computers.

Inventory managers can save their company money with a digital asset management system. These systems offer a more transparent oversight of their inventory, and give a better idea of what they have and what they need. This helps to reduce redundant inventory. Digital tracking systems can store information specifying where items are located, making it easy to track items across several facilities. Knowing where items are located at all times is essential for security purposes and also makes them easy to find when needed. Such efficient systems help reduce the risk of theft of valuable assets.

Software systems have evolved over the years. Today online, or web-based systems, have become powerful and highly customizable. These systems can provide customizations that organize inventory information in to categories that can include date of purchase, purchase price, condition, location or any other detail. Being accessible online allows managers to log into their company’s account in real time from any location with an Internet connection.

Helpdesk by bigWebApps has developed a system to envelop all of the needs for your asset management as well as make existing system integration simple, no matter what existing measures you have in place. Our Helpdesk system is a web based, meaning you’ll have access to all of your information wherever you have an internet connection. Our Software as a Service (SaaS) provides you with instant system set up and deployment.

Browse our site for more information: http://helpdesk.bigwebapps.com