Company finds the answer on cloud LC9
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday July 21, 2009
CUSTOM-BUILT software solutions can present a challenge when a business wants to expand to other locations. However, one company has found the answer is in the clouds.When sales and merchandising company Master Brokers decided to expand beyond its Brisbane base into Sydney and other capital cities across the country, its standard database didn't have the capability to handle multiple sites.It had been customised for the particular business needs of Master Brokers, which wanted to have its state-based staff utilising the same database system.So it took steps towards implementing a "cloud" computing system, which provides IT services over the internet.The service is called LC9 and is based on 3Tera's AppLogic cloud-computing platform. The idea was to take the existing database into the cloud, to be able to run across multiple sites, removing the need to set up a new database."You could only really use it for one site. It was OK if it was on a local area network but as soon as you tried to put it across the web, it became cumbersome, slow, it would drop out and it just didn't work," says the director of Master Brokers, John Cutuli. "Since LC9 came about, it has been really stable," he says.The company had managed to expand its business by establishing strategic and co-operative alliances with similar companies in other capital cities, covering six states. In 2007, Master Brokers had about 37 staff on its books and it now has about 155, most of whom are casual, Cutuli says."To get good-quality staff in that 2007 period was hard because unemployment was so low," Cutuli says. "The idea of approaching other people that have good businesses in their state seemed to be the best way to get the ball rolling. But in saying that, we all had different systems and procedures."In addition to ensuring the company had the same look and feel as one entity in front of its customers, Cutuli says one of the biggest sticking points was getting staff from different states to adhere to a national reporting system.Previously, it would have taken days to merge six reporting formats gathered from around the country, whereas with LC9 in place, it only takes a few minutes."A big growing pain was going from everyone using their own individual reporting system to a national reporting system, which created a lot of inefficiencies," Cutuli says. "Trying to merge six documents into one, everyone having a different terminology or format, it looked messy."
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald