Today’s on-premise servers are able to provide effective and cheap web conferencing and to compete even with clouds, as the Californian company R-HUB’s products clearly prove.
Are cloud solutions really cheaper than ownership? Aka opex against aka capex, where the first stands for the cloud approach and the latter for the on-premise approach, is a debate that managers wage daily at companies. Readers would be probably taken to instinctively opt for opex, as everybody has been so well evangelized on the cloud wonders and advantages in the last few years. They will certainly do that, after reading the numbers given by a Yankee Groups study which clearly shows that on-premise systems are, on average, 60 per cent more expensive than cloud solutions.
Yet, in the meantime something has changed in web conferencing industry, and what is common truth might have now become a fallacy, even though limitedly to the field of web conferencing. The fact is that server producers have not stayed idle, they have developed new products that are able to compete with clouds. An example is the Californian company R-HUB‘s web conferencing servers.
They are small, compact, silent, self-installing, self-configuring and self-updating on-premise servers purposely designed for small businesses (but they can be utilized also in the context of a global multinational). Real plug-and-play servers, they have smartly solved many issues about costs and expenses that are traditionally associated with capex, like:
- Licensing. R-HUB adopts a flat license that allows utilizers to add further participants to a web conference at zero cost. On the contrary, cloud scalability has always a price at the moment that it is necessary to scale up the resources utilized (and the relative costs) in order to face the loader traffic generated by the increasing number of participants.
- Maintenance, installing and configuring. Being real plug and play servers, R-HUB’s products do not need either any IT team or maintenance. Cloud solutions, on the contrary, need some software men that take care of what is going on the cloud (and maintenance, even though this detail is never mentioned).
- Training. No need to train staff to utilize new products, as R-HUB’s interfaces are very intuitive and easy to use.
- Data migration. This is a common problem of both clouds and on-premise servers. Being costs similar, this factor does not make any difference.
- Integration. R-HUB web conferencing servers can be integrated to API`s, software or whatever else of other vendors thanks to the LDAP protocol and other tools developed by the company. Visit R-HUB web site for further information http://www.rhubcom.com
- Hidden costs. A common hidden cost of servers is that they need a cabinet or a whole room that hosts them. This is not the case for R-HUB’s web conferencing servers. They are so silent and small that they can be place even on a shelf of your office bookcase.
And the price? R-HUB’s product prices range from 295 US$ to 1495 US$. Probably less than an Amazon instance, certainly less than your secretary monthly wage.
The post Web Conferencing, on-premise servers versus clouds. Are cloud solutions really cheaper? appeared first on RHUB Blog: Web Conferencing & Remote Support.