June 13, 2005 - (HOSTSEARCH.COM) - Web hosting providers are currently faced with the problem of how to make their services ‘sticky’. That is, how do you keep your customers from jumping to another host as soon as they offer an ultra-low priced promotional designed to steal market share? Some hosting companies are offering very low cost hosting plans with a year contract only to find that many customers are reluctant to tie themselves to one company for the long term. Most hosting companies now offer a very solid or several control panels to easily automate the processes of managing a website but as control panels are nearly ubiquitous their value in keeping customers from jumping ship is questionable. The trend that has emerged from this situation is that hosting companies are offering services that go beyond web hosting that help their clients manage other aspect of their companies such as hosted enterprise-level communications services and content management related services. With that in mind, the recent partnership of business process outsourcing services company LASON and document management software firm EVER Corp becomes relevant in terms of what web hosting companies can do to differentiate and survive.
LASON’s business process outsourcing services include scanning and conversion, accounts payable and accounts receivable processing, loan processing and claims processing. EVER America develops and markets its web based EVERSuite family of software for document, image and records management. Both firms target document intensive industries that require the highest standards in regulatory compliance, security and privacy.
“As a business process outsourcer specializing in document processing, we are always being asked to provide more and more document oriented services. With this partnership, EVER America’s software enables us to offer a much wider array of document services ranging from complete software solutions that get deployed at the customer’s site, to daily processing of documents managed in a hosted environment,” said Dave Lovegrove, President & General Manager of LASON Canada Company.
This new solution offering was unveiled at the Local Government Management Association’s annual conference last week in Whistler, British Columbia. Municipal officials in particular, are challenged with an ever increasing volume of documents including paper, electronic documents and email all of which must be cost effectively managed in accordance with Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection legislation.
“One of the challenges we have faced, when deploying document and records management software to customers in both the public and private sectors, was dealing with back file conversions. Often times there are rooms filled with banker’s boxes, all of which were to be scanned and indexed as part of the project plan which could literally take in-house resources years to complete. With this partnership we can now utilize the capacity of the North American leader in document conversion and have the job done in one week, at a quality and price point that will be difficult to match” said J.Paul Haynes, President & CEO of EVER America.
