It’s been 5 years and Royal Papers is still going strong after switching to a Pick Cloud MultiValue system.
Royal Papers, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri is a family-owned business that has been serving its customers since 1948. They provide a wide range of janitorial and cleaning supplies, support, and training for their industry. They have 6 different locations with staff that need to access their MultiValue system.
Royal had an aging, unstable RS/6000 machine with an older version of a MultiValue database. The database software needed to be upgraded if they were going to move to a new piece of hardware since the older version was not compatible with the new AIX operating system.
Royal ultimately chose OpenQM DBaaS (Database-as-a-Service). The $15 per month per seat, not only included the OpenQM license, the OpenQM software maintenance, AccuTerm, and all the cloud infrastructure needed to run their MultiValue PICK application.
Royal’s MultiValue application is mission-critical and the lifeblood of its business. It handles inventory control, accounts payable, and receivables (and more) and is used for everything except payroll. If it is disrupted in any way, or down for any long period of time, it would be catastrophic.
Any moves made needed to be done strategically so as not to disrupt their business. They entrust Pick Cloud and Google to make sure they are up and running smoothly all the time.
“Hardware and software upgrades cost money so they never get done and upgrades get behind. With just a phone call and an hour or two, we can increase our storage or memory with no disruption to us”, said Steve Henkel, director of information systems.
They also upgraded their AccuTerm version to version 8 to take advantage of AccuTerm’s “ReZume” feature. This allows their users to maintain a persistent connection to their QM server without any disruption if any one of their locations experiencing internet or network connectivity issues.
Benefits of the cloud solution include predictable monthly costs, flexibility, security, and some performance increases.
Performance increases are typically seen due to Google’s world-class infrastructure and global fiber network with virtually zero network latency.
Challenges can arise with Internet connections and the equipment needed to provide those persistent connections. Software like AccuTerm’s ReZume can help mitigate disconnects. The cloud will expose any drop in connection so having a consistent Internet connection and good supporting hardware such as modems, routers or switches is paramount.
“Pick Cloud was the natural choice for taking us from our slow, aging Pick/MultiValue system to the cloud. To say that they have been extremely helpful and available would be an understatement. Every stumbling block we encountered in our conversion was responded to quickly and met with a positive can-do attitude. They did whatever needed to be done to help us succeed and continue to do so to this day” said Steve Henkel. “We have no regrets about moving to the cloud.”