The dpivision.com Ltd Weblog

We are very pleased to announce the complete integration for the www.vps.net platform using www.cannybill.com.

VPS.NET is a Cloud Hosting provider who set out to build a cloud that was both powerful and easy to use, their node architecture makes hosting in the cloud possible for everybody, it comes with standard features such as instant server deployment in both the US and UK, hardware self healing and daily billing.

Cloud computing at your finger tips!

• Create web based order forms to sell nodes and virtual machines.
• Enable your customers to manage every aspect of their VPS via their own customer portal!

Login to you CannyBill admin panel and go to settings -> Plugin Modules -> and enter your VPS.NET login API credentials.

Now its time to create a web based order form which your customers can signup to. Go to the Packages tab -> Create New Order Group (department) -> and select the VPS.NET option.

One your order group has been created, you can setup the prices for each node you want to sell.

Once your order form has been setup with the correct pricing, click on the magnifier icon to preview your order form and simply copy/pate the URL to a buy now button on your website. Don’t forget, you can integrate your order form into any website as you have full control over the header/footer HTML and the CSS style sheet.

Please find some live order form examples below:

http://www.cannybill.com/demos.html

Your customers can now buy their nodes and select their virtual machine all though a streamlined ordering process.

Once the order has been placed and paid for, your customers get emailed their login details for their very own customer portal giving them full control over their VPS.

Your customers can view and manage every aspect of their VPS from performing a graceful shutdown to a power off or reboot.

Customers can also manage their console, view CPU usage and bandwidth charts to enabling backups on their system.

VPS nodes can also easily be added or removed from any virtual machine all within a few easy steps.

We are pleased to announce two new features for www.cannybill.com.

Purchase Order Number (PO Number)

This new feature enables you to add a Purchase Order Number of your choice to an invoice.

Admin -> Invoices -> Create New Invoice

Private/Public Notes

This feature has been carried on from the previous Customer Notes feature below:

http://blog.dpivision.com/2009/06/new-feature-customer-notes/

You can now also make your notes private (admins) or public (customers) and also upload images, .zips or documents to go with your notes.

Customers -> View Customer Details -> Add Customer Note

From this page you can enter your note, make it private or public and also upload any files.

Customer My Account -> Customer Notes

If the note has been made public, your customers when they login to their ‘My Account’ section will be able to see any notes posted and download any files.

We’ve just come across a very interesting article concerning Software as a Service or Saas which was published by Rackspace, the company that manages all our servers.

This is of particular interest to us as our latest product www.cannybill.com runs on this exact business model.

A new survey adds weight to the idea that Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming increasingly popular due to the current financial downturn.

Research by the UK’s National Computing Centre (NCC) has found that more companies are considering SaaS as an alternative to more traditional IT infrastructure. The market data showed that as many as a third of the businesses surveyed were either binning or delaying the IT deployment they’d been planning – indicating that the current financial situation is having an impact on IT upgrade plans.

The report took information from 100 UK sites representative of a wide variety of organisations in a number of sizes and verticals, and 23 per cent indicated they would be putting hardware upgrades on hold. An equal number of businesses said they would be doing the same for software research plans.

According to news site CBR Middleware, Steven Fox of the NCC said: “This will force companies to look more seriously at alternative delivery infrastructure such as SaaS and cloud computing.”

The results support recent research which has indicated that in the next year many IT investments will be under close scrutiny as companies attempt to weather the recession. For example, earlier this month a Gartner survey claimed that 90 per cent of organisations were set to grow SaaS.

Additionally, NCC’s research found that 30 per cent of the respondents saw SaaS as either an ‘important’ or ‘very important’ alternative to traditional forms of application infrastructure delivery.