Can you give me an idea of what you’ll charge to maintain and support our system?

ABS offers multiple support plans to provide the perfect fit for your business. Our plans range from as "needed", giving you full control over support activities to contract IT, which gives you an onsite presence for immediate problem resolution. Our monitoring plans, coupled with remote administration, provide a real-time notification of any system problems or potential issues. Our customers tell us that one of our strengths is our responsiveness to their service requests, as well as monitoring notifications.

Our previous vendor charged us several times when attempting to fix the same problem. Is that a common practice or should we expect better?

There are indeed times when a technician must "peel the onion". Sometimes resolving one problem uncovers another underlying problem that also must be fixed. However, that only happens infrequently. If your vendor cannot explain this process to your satisfaction then it may be that he didn't apply the correct fix the first time. Our technicians work from your perspective, meaning that they treat the system as if it were their own and adjust their billing appropriately if they didn’t resolve the issue on the first attempt. We bill fairly, because that’s how we want to be treated.

Speaking of billing – do you have a list of all the "extras"? We are currently billed for travel charges, administrative fees, night and weekend appointments, and different support rates, depending on which technician provides support.

We don't have an extensive list, because we don’t bill for many of these "extras". We pay our technicians for work that they perform outside of their normal workhours and because our costs are directly related to our support rates, we do apply a surcharge for these appointments. We don't bill for travel within the Colorado Springs metro area, no administrative fees, and no change in your rates, no matter which technician provides support. We strive to keep our billing as simple as we can, yet offer enough support plan variations to give you choices.

We subscribed to a monitoring service with our last vendor, but it didn't help. The notifications went out, but they didn't respond and resolve the problem before we were impacted. What is different about this service?

Absolutely nothing. Monitoring software is just a tool to provide advance notice to the vendor and report on the performance of the system. Responsiveness (or lack of) is a characteristic of the support vendor. If responsiveness and reliability is as important to the vendor as it is to us, you'll see it whether we are notified by monitoring software, an online service ticket, or a telephone call. Our customers consistently tell us this is where we separate ourselves from the competition.

We already have an IT person on staff. Why would we want to subscribe to system monitoring?

ABS has invested over $30,000 in state-of-the-art systems to monitor, measure, and report on systems of all sizes. You can subscribe to our service for a fraction of that, while enjoying all of the benefits. We simply redirect the notifications to your staff and they decide whether to get us involved or resolve the issue themselves. The notification saves them valuable time so they can get you back up and running with minimal downtime.

Where is the value in your monitoring services? The price seems high for a few reports and automatic notification for your technicians.

Each time your system or even a single workstation goes down, it costs you money. Have you ever considered what it costs you to pay each of your employees for one hour? If they aren't able to work normally because of a workstation or system failure, your productivity stops, but your wage and benefit expenses keep marching on. We find that our non-monitoring customers typically spend one or two hours attempting to resolve the issue when the system fails, then contact us so we can scramble a tech and begin to troubleshoot the problem. It's probable that the cost of your downtime has exceeded the cost of the monitoring subscription at this point. The question is: how do you want to discover system problems – when nothing is working or when we let you know we’ve resolved a problem.

ABS charges for the first meeting, even though we haven’t chosen ABS as our developer. Why?

During our initial consultation and design meeting, we discuss your business objectives and design preferences with you. Upon the conclusion of that meeting, we then prepare a Statement of Work that presents the project plan, using the details we have discussed during our meeting. At that point, you have a functional project plan that you are then free to use to solicit bids from all vendors. We believe that our time to develop this plan for your use is worth compensation.

We had a poor experience with our developer the last time we redesigned our site. What steps does ABS take to ensure that we will be happy this time?

ABS gains most of its new programming business through referrals and existing customers. Thus, we want to have happy customers and successful projects. We review the project with you at every step to ensure that we’re producing exactly what you want. We also create programming code according to industry standards and provide full documentation so that there are no secrets when it comes to your software. Finally, we give you a fixed-price bid for the project, so that there are no surprises later.

If you have already started my project and I decide to add more features, can I do so?

This happens frequently. Once you see what we can create, you will probably get more ideas for your project. When that happens, we create a Change Order for the project. It’s like a mini-proposal and spells out what needs to be done, how long it will take, and what it will cost.

Who owns the software when the project is complete and paid for?

You do. We create the website or application to your specifications, using your graphics and your words. Once you’ve paid us for our work, we believe you should have full control. We don’t believe in holding anyone hostage and forcing them to use our services. We give you an open copy of the source code for safekeeping. Our development agreements specifically state that you own the software, once it’s complete and we’ve received payment in full.

We have found independent programmers working in their off-hours who quote a much lower price. Why the discrepancy and what would we gain by using ABS?

There are a lot of independent programmers working from their homes or during their off-hours. They can offer a lower price because they don’t have the business expenses that we do. However, we’ve been doing this for over fifteen years and bring the assurance that we’ll be there in the future, should you need support or want to make changes. We receive a lot of calls from businesses looking for someone to take over a project that has been abandoned. We can support these sites and applications, but it takes time for us to reverse engineer the application so that we can then make the changes. In some cases, the code has been compiled by the previous programmer and we are unable to do anything but rewrite the software. In the long term, you may not realize the savings that appear to be there today.

We can get a lower price for hosting from one of the mega-hosters. Why would we consider ABS?

We started our hosting services in response to our customers asking for a trustworthy alternative to hosting with a company they didn’t know. Because we’re small, our costs are higher than the large corporations dedicated to webhosting. Our customers tell us it is worth the additional expense to have someone they trust and who is responsive when they call, rather than placing their call into a queue.

Can you host our website, which includes a store and shopping cart?

Yes. We host several e-commerce sites now. There are three components to an e-commerce website: the store, the payment gateway, and the merchant account. The store and shopping cart are hosted on our servers. You select the merchant account (credit card processor) and we’ll help you select the vendor for the payment gateway that serves as the conduit between your store and the merchant account.

We continue to struggle with spam and the occasional virus in our email messages. Do you have a solution that works without costing a lot?

We offer our SecureIT^SM email services for just these problems. Our spam filtering is rated +98% effective on both viruses and spam filtering for both incoming and outgoing messages. Here’s why that’s important – if just one computer on your system becomes infected and starts generating spam, your entire system can be blacklisted and blocked from sending email. By routing all outgoing messages through our filter, we ensure that this won't happen. If you have ever been blacklisted, you know the pain you must go through to clean this up. For about $50 per user per year, you can be completely protected and stop wasting time deleting spam.

I’ve read that my industry may be required to archive emails and provide an audit trail for compliance. Do you offer anything that will do that?

Actually, our SecureIT^SM email services have a new option for email archiving. For about $50 per user per year, we’ll add the email archiving option to your subscription. A copy of your messages will be stored in a database that you can access and search through a web page. This eliminates the need to include email in your daily backups, which is often the source of backup errors. Also, you won’t need to retain messages in your Inbox, Sent Items, or Deleted Items, which can impact the performance of your computer. And, it doesn’t have to be company wide. You can order this option for your executive staff or others handling sensitive messages, but not pay for the service where it doesn’t make sense to do so.

Our backup solution fails regularly and we’re not confident that our data is safe. Do you have a reliable solution that is easy to use?

We offer eTape^SM backup services, which is an online backup provided by Seagate Technologies. Your data is encrypted and stored on redundant servers and is administered through a web console. This solution requires a high-speed Internet connection and can be used for individual computers and servers or a complete system. Agents are included to backup MS Exchange and MS SQL Server databases. The backups are retained for 30 days, with notifications sent after each backup job. It’s the most reliable and intuitive solution we’ve found and backed by one of the largest names in the industry.

We’ve heard about the importance of having a plan for disaster recovery for our business. What does that mean and how could it help us?

You can never anticipate when an event may occur that will impact your ability to conduct your daily business operations. For that reason, a business continuity plan (BCP) is recommended for every business of every size. The plan defines your alternatives if you are unable to work normally, and includes how and where to setup temporary offices, how to notify your vendors, employees, and customers, and how to restore those operations that are critical to your business. Provisions for obtaining your critical business data and making it accessible are a crucial part of this plan. ABS conducts a series of interviews to identify those critical operations and creates a plan that is customized to your needs. The BCP can be as simple or complex as necessary to get your business back up and running on a timetable that you set. If your business is ever in a crisis, you will develop this plan. It’s just smart to create that plan before you’re in the crisis.

Didn’t answer your question? Contact us and we’ll give you answers for your business.