We at SCS are sending our last Sun server to the recycler.

The Bee Group Newspapers of Amherst, NY, a Layout-8000™ user for many years, will be getting its next Layout-8000 upgrade on modern Intel NUCs running Linux. Trey Measer, Bee Group publisher, was somewhat surprised to learn that SCS kept a Sun server just to support his newspaper.

Our Sun needed to be sent to a better place. When running, it put off nearly 3000 BTU of heat per hour. An extra ton of expensive A/C cooling equipment was needed just for it. Our secondary backup A/C system was failing and taking care of our Sun could cost $12,000 in new cooling equipment.

The Sun consumed much electrical power and delivered not much computing power, at least not in current terms. Our Sun 3500 Enterprise Server had two 400 MHz processors and about 100 GB of disk space. Prices for bare-bones Sun servers started at over $4,000. The three year total cost of ownership of such a fully configured Sun server was estimated to be $88,000.

And now - what was that device sitting on top of the Sun?

Support revenue has always been very important to SCS. We want to keep customers much longer than their hardware is likely to last. It is not just Suns that have become obsolete. Many versions of Windows and the computers they ran on have reached end of life. Long before Windows appeared on the scene, SCS software ran on DEC and HP computers. And, of course, it runs on the Sun.
Each new generation of technology brings new challenges. We expect specific computers and operating systems to become obsolete. SCS guards against being negatively impacted by this by investing in keeping our software platform independent and using either commodity or open source operating systems with no third party layered products. This distinguishing difference makes adopting next generation platforms easier while reducing the total cost of ownership of SCS's systems.

As Bee publisher Trey Measer learned first-hand, SCS supplies enduring customer support.

A sense of immediacy, universal buy-in and personal involvement: these are some of the shared attributes The Lawton (OK) Constitution management team brought to the table as the daily newspaper embarked with Software Consulting Services (SCS) on an ambitious, six-week timetable to overhaul an antiquated lineup of advertising and accounting systems.

The project managers for SCS credited the expedited rollout and successful go-live to the mentality of the paper’s management team. “There’s only so much we can do with technology,” said Keith Keffer, SCS business systems manager. “We have to have the site want to go forward and push it forward.”

The paper went live in June with what SCS describes as its “Community Advertising System Enterprise Edition Subscription”. The solution is marketed as a monthly service in which SCS provides hardware, software and managed support for an array of advertising-based applications that had traditionally been sold by site license.

Already a customer of SCS’s automated advertising dummying system, Layout-8000™
, The Lawton Constitution added:

• AdMAX™, which is SCS’s retail and classified order entry, scheduling, billing and accounts receivable solution;
• SCS/ClassPag™, its classified pagination solution;
• SCS/Track™, its ad tracking and workflow management solution; and
• CAS™, its customer-facing web-portal for a variety of self-service functions (including ad proofing, e-tearsheets, classified liner order entry, bill paying, etc.).

The first phase focused on setup, training and implementing the AdMAX, SCS/ClassPag and Layout-8000 products. SCS/Track and CAS were slated to follow later this summer.

“From the first week of training [in late April] to go-live was about six weeks,” Keffer said, “[That] wouldn’t have been possible if the site didn’t have such a good attitude. Everyone involved in the decision-making for purchasing the system was 100% behind it and they made that clear to everyone who worked for them.”

“Not only did they buy into it, but they were very involved,” said Jonathan Ebling, SCS’s pre-press project manager, who participated in the installation and go-live.

“As with any change, everybody was just a little bit apprehensive, but it helped having [the SCS team] around to hold our hands,” Owensby said. “That first day everybody was pulling their hair out. By the third day, everybody [was saying], ‘This isn’t too bad.’ By the fourth day, everybody was just flying through it.”
Kim Dodds, advertising director, observed that the team’s confidence is “building every day.”

In retrospect, it was easier for the management team to be on board from the start, having fretted over the imminent failure of the legacy system. “I mean, there was a couple times when we weren’t sure we were going to get [the paper] out,” Owensby said. “That’s the reason [we] were comfortable with it going in.”

A demo of the vendor’s classified product helped distinguish SCS from the paper’s other prospective choices. “We looked at them and a couple of others,” Owensby said. “It looked like it was a pretty easy system. We didn’t feel like the learning curve would be quite as much as with some of the others. That played a lot into it. It seemed to be something we could implement quickly – and fortunately, that’s the way it’s been.”

It didn’t hurt that the paper was already familiar with SCS as a Layout-8000 customer, Owensby acknowledged.

It’s hard to overstate, Curtolo said, “just how manual the workflow was” and “how many hoops they had to jump through” to schedule, dummy, build and invoice a display ad prior to the conversion. “Their workflow consisted of a hand-filled-out sheet that the sales reps would fill in. They’d pass that around to the different parties – order entry in accounting and production – and then the production folks would grab that sheet and start using that to build the ads. We’ve gotten rid of that sheet for two of those steps. There’s one more step to [eliminate] and then the sheet will go away,” replaced by a single data entry step.

“It streamlined all our processes,” Cottingham said.

Subscription Model and Managed Services

SCS’s shift in focus from selling software site licenses to providing an array of services – software, hardware, support and managed services – via a subscription model was also seen by the Lawton management team as a major plus. “That was a huge part of our decision,” Cottingham said.

“All the servers are theirs; all the software is theirs, and we just pay the monthly service. We also get all the updates,” Owensby said. “They have remote capability if there’s something that’s going haywire. They’re able to go in there and take care of it remotely, which is handy. And also, 24/7 tech support doesn’t hurt.”

“It’s the latest version of the full-function software that we’ve installed for years and years for customers who purchased the site licenses outright,” Curtolo explained. “The difference is that now we’re taking this approach of packaging it together, doing the subscription service and providing the hardware.”

“One of the reasons we’ve had success” with this approach, according to Keffer, is that “we take ownership of a lot of the day-to-day” tasks that an on-site applications specialist would otherwise perform. “We’ve had a few sites where because of staffing issues – where they’ve lost people or had to downsize – they’ve been able to take advantage of us.’’ It costs a lot less for SCS’s managed services, he said, than “having a body on site,” and it’s an added benefit to newspaper customers that “they don’t have to worry about managing all that stuff.”

The vendor has an installed customer base of 20 newspapers that are utilizing its full suite of advertising products, Curtolo said. This is in addition to the more than 200 that have one or just a few of the modules.

Having become one of them, the management team at The Constitution has expectations that in addition to productivity savings, the newspaper will realize revenue gains from the new upsell features in SCS’s classified product. “We’ve already generated some,” Cottingham said. “I was looking at some reports this morning, and it looks like the boxes and logos are up from what they were.”

Owensby acknowledged that the gains will take time. “It’s a slow process, because everybody’s got to get comfortable with [the new system], but at some point we’re going to get there, and we feel like there’ll be enough additional revenue generated to take care of the monthly cost.”