How hosted desktops have the edge over Sage Drive

Many software companies nowadays are focused on developing Cloud based applications, software as a service. Our modern mobile world demands the ability to access all our applications at any time, anywhere and software vendors are falling over themselves to comply.

However, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that many of these web based applications don’t appear to be as functional or as feature rich as their locally installed counterparts, and all too often their performance is underwhelming.

A simpler option is to host the feature rich client application, the operating system it runs on, and the data or database it uses altogether in the Cloud and access the whole lot as a remote desktop or remote application. This solution, commonly called hosted desktops or hosted applications provides the best of both worlds; the performance, functionality and features of a locally installed application with the flexibility, resilience and security offered by the Cloud.

A slightly alternative approach has been adopted by accounting software company Sage, for their popular Sage 50 Accounts package. Here they have gone for a combination of a locally installed client plus synchronisation to the Cloud with their Sage Drive solution; but how does it compare with the traditional on premise server or a hosted desktop? A quick Google search on “Sage Drive Problems” highlighted some frustrated customers on AccountingWeb so we asked one of our partners who are a leading Sage implementation consultant for their unbiased view, here’s what they came back with

Sage Drive is Sage’s attempt to “catch-up” in the Cloud arena, but it isn’t really Cloud in that the solution still heavily relies on local installs and a local database. The “Master” install of Sage synchronises the database with Sage’s cloud servers which in turn synchronises changes to other installations in the customers’ business.

There are a number of issues with how this works, primarily the master installation has to be online for the whole thing to work, so if that version is on the Finance Manager’s laptop and he’s turned it off then Sage Drive doesn’t work. So it pushes the customer to rely on an on premise server to hold the database, so not really in the spirit of Cloud computing and what if this computer crashes or is out of action for a time or even stolen?

If the master installation is given an updated version of the application then all the other installs must be updated before they can use it. If you have an organisation with 10 users this takes a bit of time, and in our experience, doesn’t always work, so you have to raise a helpdesk call with Sage. This is so different when using a Cloud Hosted Desktop with Sage installed as the application only has to be updated once on the hosted server and everyone gets the new version instantly.

The Sage Drive also appears to be the cause of a lot of corrupted databases, which in our experience never seems to happen on a Hosted Desktop platform. This again requires another call to Sage support.

Incidentally we understand Sage Drive is hosted with Amazon Web Services, so not held in the UK, this may be important to customers who have compliance policies regarding where data is kept.

All in all, in our view a hosted desktop platform provides a much more stable, trouble free and flexible way of running Sage as a proper Cloud application. So what are hosted desktops? In short hosted desktops are simply a hosted Windows server running as a hosted Terminal Server to provide the user either a full remote desktop or just individual remote applications, depending on preference. The application e.g. Sage and its database also reside on the server, so they can be accessed anywhere via the Internet and on any device, including Mac, iPads and Android tablets. A good hosted desktop provider will manage the server, providing backups, anti-virus, patches and updates to your application when required.