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RapidHost Limited,
Keypoint,
17-23 High Street,
Slough,
Berkshire,
SL1 1DY,
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partner hosting services

white label hosting for greater revenue opportunity

Broaden your customer offer with a managed service alternative to capital purchase - increase sales and revenue potential ...

White Label Hosting

What is it?

White Labelling is the name given to the strategy of offering a partner’s product or service to your customers under your own brand name.  This approach makes a lot of sense where you want to introduce new offers that protect customer loyalty but don’t want to build the in-house capability to do-it-yourself.

Many organisations use white labelling as a core part of their go-to-market strategy, including many IT companies, who embed licenced technology in their own products, all the way through to retail giants like Tesco.

What has it got to do with me?

We are an experienced and successful hoster.  To achieve this has taken us years of learning and hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment.  We can make all of that available to you on a white label basis.

This means that you can extend the offer that you make to your customers to include a managed service option without taking on the cost or risk of the hosting yourselves.

An extended offer like this will add value to your overall customer proposition which will lead to increased revenues as well as enhanced customer loyalty.

And the fact that you can achieve this with no start-up costs or risk is down to the white label approach of using RapidHost’s existing infrastructure and staff.

How does it work in practice?

RapidHost would work with you to determine the optimum hosting configuration(s) for your offer along with related service components (monitoring, backup, patching and so on).  We’d then work out a lead-time and pricing regime that would allow you to create an attractive offer to your customers.

Operationally, when you’ve made a sale, we’d configure and commission the hosting environment needed, upload the initial system, application and data files that we’ve pre-agreed, test everything and let you know when it’s all ready.  We bill you and you bill the customer, adding a suitable margin of course.

Thereafter we manage the system on your customer’s behalf and bill you according to the level and period that we’ve agreed.  Similarly, you bill your customer.

Should a system fault need to be reported by the customer, they’d contact you in the normal way and you’d contact us after you’ve qualified the report as hosting related.

This way the customer’s has visibility of your company only.

Of course, if you’d prefer that we took the initial customer fault report, then we can set up systems to do that.  We can either correspond with your customer under your company name or use our own depending upon your wish.

What will it cost me to do all of this?

There is genuinely no financial cost to you to set up a white label hosting arrangement with RapidHost. 

There will, of course, be costs related to bringing the managed service offer to your customers/market but these are normal marketing items only.

How can RapidHost help me sell the managed service to my customers?

RapidHost can set up a demonstration environment for your managed service as part of our partnership with you.  We’ll pre-load it with a suitable system setup and keep it securely online for you.

This means that you can easily demonstrate your application in a hosted environment to prove to customers that performance will not be an issue.  In most cases, we can do this at no cost to you, but where specific or expensive hardware is required we would need to charge.

What about my software licence fee payment?

Many software development companies rely on the software licence fee ‘lump sum’ for their cash flow management.  Moving to a managed service would normally mean that the licence fee is spread over the contract period, thus you’d need to wait one, two or even three years to get it all.

However, there are two ways of offering a managed service and still getting the licence fee upfront. 

Firstly, when defining your offer to customers you can include the licence fee in a one-off ‘set up’ payment.  Depending upon the size of the licence fee versus the other contractual components this may or may not be acceptable to the customer.

The second option involves RapidHost buying the software licence from you upfront in the same way that it buys the operating system and database licenses when setting up a hosted environment.  This means that the customer has a much smaller ‘set up’ fee at the start of the contract and this option is often more attractive for that reason.  Depending upon the size of the licence fee, RapidHost might need to contract directly with the customers in this situation.

Does RapidHost being the service provider have to be hidden from my customers?

No.  If you prefer, we can work in an overt partnership basis with you.  We can still pre-agree a pricing approach with you, but would contract directly with your customers.  We’ll then handle all of the bills and service reports.

Within the agreed pricing approach we can allocate a referral fee that we’ll pay to you as part of the customers billing cycle.

Remind me of the advantages of offering a managed service to my customers ...

Advantages to you:

• Expand the service wrap-around that you can offer to your core application product
• Offer a financially attractive alternative to capital purchase
• Generate increased revenues
• Generate a residual income stream to counterbalance a dependence on licence fee lump sums
• Facilitate sales of your application to customers who might otherwise decline because of the IT infrastructure cost, risk and skills requirement

Advantages to your customer:

• Able to use your application without any additional in-house IT investments or need for system-level IT skills
• A way of spreading the purchase and operational cost of the entire system and support over a multi-year period
• Ability to use your application outside of their physical office without having to build in Virtual Private Networks of other network gateways
• Ability to use your application without any technical impact on their current IT infrastructure
• No impact on their balance sheet
• Removal of issues regarding end-of-life management of the server environment
• No software licensing issues to worry about