Anyone Remote Hosting Lawson?
Looking for some experience feedback...
What Company? Pros/Cons.... IF so, are you LSF9?

Siemens RCO here, 8.0.3.10

Uptime is fine, latency is not an issue despite being 1000 miles away from the machine, and they do quite a bit of customization to make life easier on us. Their support is good, they're always pretty responsive to our issues.

I've never worked in a non-hosted environment, so I can't really speculate on the drawbacks - simply put, I don't know what I'm missing. I often wonder what benefits we would have to show if we (well, they....I wasn't part of that decision) had chosen to run it on our own.

I know we're paying quite a bit for the hosting, and averaged out over the last 5 years, we might have been better off (financially) purchasing the hardware and hiring/training the staff to run it in house.

I'm in departmental IT in a K12 school district. We're starting production July 1 with HR/Payroll AS/400 8.03, hosted by an ESD about 100 miles away. We are replacing in house, custom written systems.

The ESD hosts Lawson for a number of school districts (nine I think) in their area, and since we are not part of their ESD, we pay an annual fee. I'm not a bean counter, but I understand that we would have never been able to afford to buy Lawson on our own, and that the fee is reasonable compared to the alternative. We are currently a DEC/Compaq/HP shop, using OpenVms Alpha servers, so in addition to buying Lawson, we'd have needed new hardware, and tech people to run it, install, maintain, upgrade, and customize Lawson.

We are the largest district hosted by the ESD, and they have been fairly responsive to our needs. They had already developed a contract module to handle the needs of K12 positions, where employees can have up to 10 positions(!), and tend to start and end positions throughout the year. They've also done some customizations specifically for us for additional fees, e.g., we've had them write pay check and direct deposit notices to work with our trifold mailers.

A difficult thing for me has been dealing with the lack of control. I've been a sysadmin on the OpenVms Alphaserver for 11 years. If something needs to be done on the Alpha, I do it: Create users, change user and file privs, restore from backups, create test systems, write and maintain code, etc.

Now if we need any of that stuff done, I make a phone call.

We are currently using Siemens for technical support and lawson for application support. We are 8.03 and have very few problems with having the box off site. The only thing I do not really lkie is the fact that we get sups ( ctps) added to our system every few months so that all the systems being hosted by Siemens are on the same level of apps, and env. This is fine but i'm from the old school if it is not broke don't fix it. Many times after a sup, I have majot repairs to do because it knocked out a mod.

At least they've dropped to quarterly, they used to do a supplemental update every two months :)