Re5al pronounced Revival, based in Lisse specializes in temperature monitoring with their SaaS solution from Re5al and is a satisfied customer of Snel.com. What this Company provides and why it chose snel.com, is explained by General Manager Edwin Lommerse and Technical Engineer Ron de Boer.
Over 20 years
Re5al is one of Edwin's companies and exists over 20 years. We mainly deliver thermometers, hygrometers, sensors and CO2 meters for instance, to hospitals, pharmacies and laboratories. These companies are obligated to monitor and guard the temperature of, for example refrigerators 24/7. Ron explains: "You can imagine it can cause quite the trouble if the monitoring of a -80 refrigerator in a hospital would fall away. We help our customers by delivering trustworthy equipment."
Wireless measuring
This company doesn't just deliver the hardware, it takes care of installation, maintenance and it delivers corresponding software packages. "Data about temperature, humidity and such are collected by our equipment. These days this is all done wireless,"Ron explains. "Through a so-called datalogger, data is collected and sent to the software package."
Trust is key
The reliability of these systems is at the top of Re5al's agenda. Ron: “If a report comes in that the system is down, we can immediately solve it remotely. Sometimes this is difficult, because there are customers who do not want us to log into the server remotely due to the AVG rules. In that case, we drive there to solve the problem on site.”
Edwin continues: “That's exactly the challenge at hand right now. Our hardware is very reliable, but in the past we often installed the software on the client's server. If there where to be a problem with the measurement, we will obviously be the first to call. To log in to the customer's server, we always needed permission from the customer's IT department. Of course, this causes the necessary delay, which does not benefit either us or the customer. What we often see when logging in is that the issue is not caused by our systems, but that the customer's server itself has encountered problems, causing it to fail. We would like to prevent this in the future.”
Unburden the customer with SaaS solution
Re5al has been supplying a total (SaaS) solution for a number of months, in which the company bears both responsibility for its own systems, but also for the server. Ron: “This way we can always reach them quickly and easily in case of calamities.”
By offering a SaaS cloud service solution, customers no longer need data and hardware on site. Ron: “Our customers no longer have to deal with hardware and get their own login. This gives them 24/7 access to the data to make and store analytics and reports. Notifications are also forwarded immediately.”
Shared responsibility
The management of the hardware and the responsibility for the upside is now a task of Re5al in cooperation with Snel.com. Edwin: “We've put our requirements with regard to server capacity and its management in writing and then started looking online for a party that would be able to supply this,” says Ron. “That was quite the quest. Initially, I came across a competitor of Snel.com, but they couldn't arrange a SQL server for us. We had to do that ourselves. Then I looked further and ended up at Snel.com.
We clicked right away. The first step, setting up a test environment, went very quickly. Getting started with this also went smoothly. They guided us through finding the type of server that was best for the customer, setting up the security certificate, and also installing our software program.”
Snel.com is not just a supplier, but a true partner
Edwin: ”Even though formally there is a customer-supplier relationship between us and Snel.com, we are jointly responsible for the product the customer receives. It's a great synergy. Our own customers know that we do business with Snel.com. What they notice is that the cloud solution is extremely stable. Much more stable and with higher uptime than we had in the old situation where the customer was responsible for their own hardware.” These enormous advantages are the reason for Re5al to encourage more customers to switch to the cloud platform.
Re5al has been a satisfied customer of Snel.com for over three years now. Ron: “We have differentiated our offering according to our customers needs. Some customers want a Managed Dedicated Server, they may have good reasons for wanting so. We deliver this via Snel.com. Other customers need a Managed VPS. And there is also something we call a shared model. In this model, you use a shared server, where everyone has their own closed part of it.”
“For our customers, not much has changed when you look at the front end of the process,” says Ron. “They can read the data and receive notifications. The fact that they have to log in via a protected web environment is no problem. The big difference is at the back-end. Our cloud platform is redundant in more than one way. Management on that level is done by Snel.com on a 24/7/365 basis. We take care of the function of the application. This division of roles runs smoothly.”
