Why Companies and Institutions Choose TradeKosmos
Software-as-a-Service for their Enterprise Platform Business

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Summary

TradeKosmos’s flexible Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution maximizes the benefits and minimizes the risks of enterprise platform business by providing a winning combination of on-demand search engine, groups, forums, blogs, tribal knowledge bases, and other social networking tools, coupled with innovative eCommerce, analytics and the experience and expertise gained from years of hosting platforms for large enterprises. As a SaaS company, TradeKosmos offers a low-maintenance solution that is fast, flexible, scalable, and secure.

With many successful solutions hosted on the TradeKosmos platform, TradeKosmos’s platform management experts have a thorough grounding in the detailed planning and execution required to deploy an online platform. As a result, TradeKosmos is in a unique position to offer the ongoing technical and business support needed to determine requirements, rapidly deploy the solution, and maintain the success of enterprise platform solutions. Customers reap the following benefits of TradeKosmos’s SaaS solutions over on-premise software:

• Superior customer service and vendor expertise
• Lower cost and lower risk deployments
• Faster innovation and application updates
• No maintenance and support hassles
• Higher availability, scalability, and performance
• Stronger security for platforms

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Putting the Service in Software-as-a-Service

Software as a service (SaaS)—a way to subscribe to software on-demand—is a delivery model that can provide increased operational and financial flexibility and reduced maintenance and technology support. It can help to deliver benefits such as speed to value, lower total cost of ownership, increased user adoption and greater solution as well as employee productivity.

SaaS is sometimes described as ‘utility computing,’ as though, like electricity, software flows over a wire bringing energy and light to subscribing businesses. It is reliable, hassle free, and it just works. But online platforms—composed as they are of human beings—evolve and mature, and they require different management strategies at different points in their lifecycle. The success of a platform is, therefore, more than just a matter of deploying code. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “A successful support forum requires more than just opening the gates to the platform. It needs a critical mass of users so that it’s more likely that any given question finds an answer.”

Helping organizations reach that critical mass is both an art and a science. It is also one of TradeKosmos’s core strengths, and a key part of the service that TradeKosmos provides. TradeKosmos has used its years of experience hosting enterprise platforms to create metrics and processes that define and track a platforms’s health, including key indicators such as the presence of “powerusers,” who in turn attract others. By starting customers down the right path, guiding them through launch, and supporting them throughout the relationship, TradeKosmos ensures that there is no chance that customers will fail.

Specifically, TradeKosmos provides:

Planning Services: TradeKosmos’s platform experts guide each customer through an initial planning process that covers confirming business goals, defining the purpose, identifying likely users and key success factors, and creating an effective incentive structure for community members.

Launch Services: Each launch is run by a TradeKosmos Customer Success Manager who manages the launch team members, objectives, scope, milestones, timing, deliverables, and documentation. The launch process also includes training for administrators, platform community planners, and moderators.

Ongoing Support and Moderation: In addition to the 24/7 technical maintenance of the application, TradeKosmos Customer Success Managers work with the customer after the launch to ensure the success of each customer platform. TradeKosmos can also provide moderators to manage and monitor forums on an ongoing basis and can design programs to identify and retain high-value participants.

Application Engineering: If the application’s numerous customization settings are not sufficient, TradeKosmos’s professional service team can tailor the User Interface (UI) to match corporate standards. TradeKosmos can also help with system integration (EAI) and migration from a previous community platform provider that the customer has outgrown.

This combination of direct support and proven methodologies is one of the biggest advantages that TradeKosmos can offer over many other SaaS or pure Open Source Software (OSS) alternatives. Unlike some SaaS vendors, who operate as traditional Application Service Providers (ASPs) simply hosting the applications from a technical perspective and leaving customers on their own for many aspects of their deployments, TradeKosmos can tell its customers not only how to use a particular feature or function, but also why a customer should use it and how to maximize the benefit from it.

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TradeKosmos Integration Advantage All TradeKosmos Platform Products are tightly integrated. This ensures a cohesive platform experience, and a seamless path for adding new services that help sustain and grow platform participation.

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Learn more about Business Benefits of SaaS
Request the TradeKosmos and SaaS Whitepaper

In this paper TradeKosmos discusses how its flexible Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution maximizes
the benefits and minimizes the risks of online platforms.

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