Where does your current estimating platform live? For most, your answer is probably installed on your local machine or an internal server dedicated specifically to your estimating platform.
At Beck Technology our mission is to revolutionize the construction industry, and we are now one step closer by providing a cloud-hosted offering of DESTINI Estimator. We realize that offering an on-premise solution limits the estimating team and their IT department. As we all know, you need the support of your IT department if you want to consider transitioning to a new estimating platform.
Why is on-premise software so limiting? For starters, requiring your estimating software to be hosted locally means a ton of work for IT departments and increased costs for the business. DESTINI Estimator’s technical support can sometimes be complicated by the fact that certain issues necessitated IT’s help since our technical support does not have access to your computer. And finally, with many people in the preconstruction team working remotely, software performance across all of your preconstruction teams can vary considerably, based on each team member’s network bandwidth.
This is why Beck Technology has decided to move our flagship product DESTINI Estimator to a cloud-hosted environment. DESTINI Estimator no longer has to exist on your local computer and instead can be accessed via an Internet connection to the Azure Cloud. Here are a few of the benefits you’ll get from a hosted environment.
Consistent Performance
As much of the preconstruction world transitioned from working in the office to working remotely due to COVID-19, challenges related to their own hardware and Internet bandwidth started to play a big part in making DESTINI Estimator slow. Moving the estimating software to the cloud, significantly reduces the bandwidth requirement to access and use DESTINI Estimator and removes network throttling associated with many VPN connections into your company’s network. While Internet connectivity is still a requirement to access the cloud, significantly less data is moved between the user’s machine and the cloud (mouse and keyboard clicks, and visual UI changes to DESTINI Estimator), resulting in a consistent and performant experience for all users, whether they are in the office, working at the job site, or anywhere in between.
Reduction in IT Investment + Cost
In an on-premises offering of DESTINI Estimator, IT departments are left with the brunt of the work of the infrastructure, administration, and support of the software. They would setup the servers, install user software, and handle each software update sometimes 2-6 times per year. With the cloud-hosted offering of DESTINI Estimator we no longer require a high-end computer to operate the software which leads to opportunities for savings on the user’s hardware. Moving to the hosted offering also removes the IT burden from the customer and instead is supported by Beck Technology. With the DESTINI Estimator hosted offering, Beck Technology administers the virtual computers, the installs, licensing setup, and backups on a cloud-hosted environment.
Less Downtime for Preconstruction.
While Beck Technology has historically received great feedback on the level of support our team provides to our customers, the turnaround time was often delayed due to the requirement to access the databases hosted on-premise, which required IT involvement. These delays could be hours to days. We know this is valuable time preconstruction teams don’t have. The hosted offering is secure with access controlled through Microsoft’s two-way authentication. However, it does enable the Beck Technology technical support team direct access to any user or company’s environment immediately. This results in a dramatic improvement in response time, leading to a significant reduction in downtime for your teams.
