Nous pensons, donc nous sommes
EQL Data October Newsletter
EQL Blog, Tuesday, October 19 2010, 21:22
Hi everyone,
You or somebody else subscribed your email address to the EQL Data "monthly" newsletter. If you don't want to receive it anymore, please reply and let us know; we'll take you off the list right away. Unfortunately, it's also possible that you asked to be removed, but hardware problems on our end caused you not to be. If this is the case, we apologize profusely, and will endeavour to remove you (for reals, this time) from future mailings.
In case you forgot, EQL Data is that company that lets you put your Access databases on the web. We've been silent for a while, thinking deeply about life, the Universe, and how to express our answers to these questions in English, but we've since decided that said answers a trade secret anyway, so you get EQL business updates instead!
Quote of the Moment: EQL Goes In-House
"Outstanding customer service and fast, easy-to-use solution. EQL implemented a global solution in 1 week and above all, followed up with constant proactive monitoring of our system. The solution reduced our database maintenance time from an average of 40 hours per quarter to less than 5 hours."
-- Fabio Italiano, Director of Business Analysis
Standard & Poor's, Operational Performance - BVR
Yes, EQL has landed some pretty big contracts during our newsletter silence. The contracts represent taking our OnWeb product to new levels; not only does it cater to web customers, but can be easily deployed within larger organizations for secure, in-house Access sharing. This development has been great for us, and kept us warm through the winter and fed the A/C during summer. Unfortunately, it also tied up all our staff, and so, we need to apologize.
Our email backlog has now reached, in some instances, up to two months. Our staff are doing their best to shift around your requests to try to handle the load, but we ask for your patience with us for a bit longer while we sort this out. We can't adequately express how amazed we are that you, our customers, have been talking about EQL to your friends, and they've been passing on the message! We handle an outstanding amount of new inquiries and trials each day now, and To those of you who are waiting on us to get back to you, or have sent emails which went unanswered for a week or so - we're sorry! We've brought on some new staff to try to deal with the flood of interest and we're doing our best to train them and bring them up to speed and standards.
During this period, we'd like to ask once again that you keep EQL a treasured secret, to share with your dearest friends and family members over tea. For best effect, you keep presents a surprise until the occasion hits, right? We'd appreciate you giving us a bit of time to get ready for a big party.
We Can Has Features?
One little side effect we should mention is that running around installing massive EQL servers in IT departments isn't all paperwork and busy support staff! We had to develop some new technologies to integrate, customize, and manage our products. If you're a longtime OnWeb user, you can expect that we will begin rolling out some of these cool technologies to your web browser:
- better listings of which users are online (how many, from where)
- fine-grained controls for those users allowing you to temporarily revoke their access
- better controls to temporarily take a database offline and perform maintenance on it
- ability to upload extra files (spreadsheets, images, etc.) necessary for running reports or other features linked to database operation
- ability to force the EQL server to queue your database for rebuilding/verification
- nicer looking Access windows/interface in OnWeb viewer
- ability to upload custom .pdf/.doc/etc. help files for your users
- better security with OnWeb sessions
- cleaner user interface
- better Access 2007 (and some 2010) support
- much more!
Phew! That's right, the interest you get on your EQL investment just keeps paying off. If only savings/mutual fund interest rates were this good.
New OnWeb Payment Plans
As most of you know, unless you're up in the Great Northern Expanse that is Canada, your EQL bills are in U.S. dollars. When we started up EQL at the end of 2008, we had few expenses, and we felt this gave our international customers a stable exchange rate and budgeting scheme. The global economy has, however, conspired to make our lives difficult in this regard.
The exchange rate between the U.S. and Canadian dollar has fluctuated wildly in this past year, forcing us to think about our pricing. Almost all our costs are in Canadian dollars, and the overhead imposed by fluctuating exchange rates made it more difficult for us to properly account for these costs. As such, we've imposed new OnWeb plans for those joining us since March, plans we feel are as stable and concise for users as they are for us. OnWeb now costs:
- $35/month for 1 user
- $145/month for 5 "concurrent users"
- $250/month for 10 "concurrent users"
- ($25/month for each additonal such user beyond 10)
- $30/month for each additional database you wish to add to a bank of users
- $75/month for SSL-encrypted synchronization and authentication > ("concurrent users" means this many maximum users can hit your database at once - you may have many more named users, but we only bill for your throughput)
If you've got your calculator out and figure that these new rates are higher than a plan you might currently be on - don't worry! We're not switching any of our existing users to the new plans unless you ask us to. If you like your costs the way they are, we will never cause you to migrate to a new plan; your old plans are yours to keep while you remain with us. For those wondering how this translates to an enterprise level, please note that we offer significant savings over linear multiples of these numbers at bulk user amounts.
OnWeb Active Trials Now World-Wide
For our own statistics, we try to track where all the customers we interact with, be they trial users that chose to ask us questions (we're friendly!) or our paying customers, are located. We can proudly say that EQL has now gone Down Under, adding both, Australia and Papua New Guinea to our ever-expanding list of EQL-serviced locations. Spearheaded by Canada and the U.S.A., our active databases now also hail from (in alphabetical order) Belgium, Holland, Malaysia, Poland, Singapore, the U.K., and other places that drink from the fountain of the Internet.
We're simply overwhelmed with the interest we're getting, and we always appreciate you contacting us to discuss proposals and ideas for new features we can add, how they might help with your projects, and how we might partner to spread the love of Access on the Web to those who haven't yet discovered it. An interesting angle we've pursued recently regards partnerships - if you're developing Access extensions, why not partner with EQL to see if you can reach a broader client base? We'd love to at least discuss it!
Every day more and more people start using OnWeb for their databases, big and small, and we love to hear how our product works for you. Please feel free to reply to this email or send a message to info@eqldata.com. Or, as always, request features (and vote on them!) by visiting http://eql.uservoice.com. We read all your questions, comments, and feedback - that's the only way we can tell how well we're doing.
Stay tuned for the somewhat-more-regular resumption of these newsletters, and as always, our friends: have fun!
Regards,
Luke Kosewski
EQL Data Inc.
(If you want to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please just reply to this message and say so. We'll remove you right away.)