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With the year 2000 rapidly approaching, five-month-old LarsonAllen Technology Solutions has set itself a suitably ambitious goal: to become "the service bureau for the next millennium."
Since its launch on Nov. by parent Larson, Allen, Weishair, the Minneapolis startup has already enlisted as a Great Plains Alliance Hosting Partner. LarsonAllen Technology Solutions director Scott Boedigheimer explains, "We're finding with many clients-the $5 million to $20 million companiesthat they don't have a lot of networking expertise in-house. They want someone to drop in a solution and be responsible for running it."
As Alliance Hosting Partner, LarsonAllen will provide a financial management outsourcing solution, focused "at least initially" on health care end users. The arrangement calls for a Great Plains Dynamics package to be installed at a client's corporate site or at a remote management facility and managed by LarsenAllen. It's similiar to the Great Plains & IBM Hosting Services venture introduced last September.
LarsenAllen plans to charge a monthly subscription fee under a three-year contract. The monthly fee will be anywhere from $500 to a couple thousand dollars depending on what services the end users need.
"Outsourcing simplifies the company's needs," says Boedigheimer. For example, "Capable [networking] people are difficult to find and difficult to retain, and they're very expensive." By going the hosting route, a client can unload a multiple of personnel and technology decisions and free itself to concentrate on its core business.
Hosting services dovetail well with LarsonAllen's mission: "We help clients capture and manage data in real time to promote commerce, service and better business decisions." Boedigheimer is a staunch advocate for real-time data. "We found that a lot of clients are managing their businesses not with numbers but from gut feel," he recalls. Too often key financial statements, with their indications of developing market trends, don't reach corporate decision makers quickly enough, according to Boedigheimer. "Sometimes [the data] is already 60 days old; by then it's too late to react to that information."
Boedigheimer insists that successful businesses act on real-time data, or at least data that's "very near-time-for example, from the day before." He concedes there are times...