Since day one, ProSolutions has designed its software with the philosophy that each spa and salon owner should have software that enables them to run their business their own way, rather than conforming to a software company’s methods. As the company saw more of its customers moving to the cloud, it became apparent that they needed to extend that philosophy towards web-enabling their software in order to meet customer needs.
In addition to demand from their existing user base, ProSolutions also saw a host of new companies spinning up simplified web-based versions of their software. Despite the lack of functionality of those new “competitors”, the market was becoming very noisy.
“We have long had the most feature-rich platform and had become the standard in the industry, but we realized we had to web-enable our offering in order to remain competitive,” said Mark Wiggins, COO at ProSolutions
Time to Redevelop?
To meet the needs of their customers, ProSolutions knew they needed to make their platform available online. And like many ISVs, they assumed that this meant they would need to completely redevelop the app for the web. The ProSolutions platform has over a million lines of code, so this would be no small task.
“We received a quote that told us it would cost between $3-5 million to redevelop our platform for the web, and it would take 12-18 months,” said Wiggins. “And in the end, it would likely only have had around 80% feature parity with our existing version. There was no way we were going to pay millions of dollars, only to provide our customers with less functionality than they were used to.”
In addition to being turned off by the cost and time associated with redevelopment, one of ProSolutions’ long-time competitors had recently launched a redeveloped app that provided an interesting lesson.
“We saw them redevelop their app for the cloud, and their web-enabled version failed miserably,” said Wiggins. “At that point we realized that we needed OUR product, in the cloud. Not a NEW product, built all over again.”
Exhausting the Cloud Enablement Options
With the idea of redevelopment behind them, ProSolutions began exploring other options. They found a cloud service provider who was proposing a remote desktop experience, but after exploring that option, they decided this would provide a poor user experience. So ProSolutions decided to go with Amazon AWS instead.
“But AWS is just a cloud – they don’t have the technical services needed to help build out and run your own virtual environment,” said Wiggins. “So we had to layer a technical services firm with AWS, which was extremely expensive. What they came up with was a solution that was very manual and tedious.”
Next, ProSolutions turned to a published app through Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). With the help of their technical service provider, they were able to roll the solution out to customers, but it did not go as planned.
“The RDP experience wasn’t up to our standards. There were barriers to access, and it was very obvious to our customers that the application wasn’t responding the way it should on different devices, such as mobile phones and tablets,” said Wiggins. “At that point, I just wanted to find a way to provide access to our application in any browser.”
The Cameyo Difference
Searching for ways to make legacy applications accessible on any device, from any browser, ProSolutions came across Cameyo. After exploring a free trial and seeing how simple it was to publish their application with Cameyo, ProSolutions began providing their customers with access to their platform on any device, from any browser.
“Our initial testing went incredibly smoothly. We needed our customers to be able to use the application just as if it were installed locally, and that’s exactly the experience they have now with Cameyo,” said Wiggins. “Our users just login from our website, or save a link to their desktop, and it opens the app in their browser – they don’t even have to know that it’s not local.”
Wiggins sees three key benefits that ProSolutions has received from Cameyo thus far:
- Simple Cloud Enablement – “With Cameyo we were able to quickly and easily provide our customers with access to our app from any browser, rather than spending millions of dollars and more than a year redeveloping the app.”
- High Performance – “Our customers are able to experience ProSolutions with the same responsiveness as if it were a local app, thanks to Cameyo.”
- Cost Control – “Cameyo’s ability to dynamically expand as demand requires is amazing. Knowing what the cost is going to be as our user base grows is critical for managing our service.”
If you’re looking for a way to securely deliver your application to your customers without any redevelopment costs, start your free trial of Cameyo today.