cumulusIQ Presents “Knowledge as a Service” at Sapience 2009

Monty Kalsi, Founder and CEO of cumulusIQ, speaks at Sapience 2009 on how SAP customers dramatically reduce maintenance and support costs by using a cloud-based virtual helpdesk

Bethlehem, PA (PRWEB) November 18, 2009

A highlight of the Sapience 2009Conference (Hyatt-Regency Hotel, Cambridge, MA, December 8-9) will be the KaaS (Knowledge as a Service) presentation by cumulusIQ Founder and CEO Monty Kalsi. The presentation takes place at 4:00 PM on day one of the conference as part of the “Track B: Beyond SAP” series.

Billed by its organizers as a “journey of independence,” the Sapience 2009 conference is “an event for CEOs, CIOs, CFOs and IT decision makers seeking to escape the limitations of a strongly vendor controlled application landscape….”

Kalsi’s presentation in particular will focus on what has become a painful issue facing SAP customers. That is the very high and sharply rising costs companies pay for ongoing application service and support.

“Today such costs typically consume most of an IT budget,” says Kalsi. “Rather than system maintenance and support, these funds might much better be spent in areas where the company can innovate to achieve competitive advantage.”

KaaS is an alternative to vendor-supplied support for which SAP customers pay high annual fees plus heavy per-incident charges to resolve any specific issue that may arise. SAP, third-party systems integrators and outsourcing providers typically charge thousands of dollars to handle such requests, which may typically involve a minimum of 40 hours of consulting support, and take 90 days or more just to schedule and get approved.

A KaaS alternative — and the subject of Kalsi’s presentation — is a virtual cloud-based helpdesk. The helpdesk connects SAP customers with globally based SAP consultants who provide knowledge and support on demand. The consultants are “crowd sourced,” meaning that participation is open to any consultant worldwide who meets cumulusIQ’s rigorous quality control standards. In addition to the consultants, cumulusIQ also qualifies and approves each answer before it is sent to the user. The service is available 24x7x365 in local languages.

“SAP customers are using KaaS today to receive real-time, on-demand, professional quality-checked answers,” states Kalsi. “They only pay for the solutions they accept and access to the helpdesk is subscription based so customers can control the service spend based on needs”. This approach is a low-cost, modular way of allowing companies to obtain the knowledge they need, when they need it, and where they need it.”

About cumulusIQ
cumulusIQ is an on-demand knowledge marketplace offering helpdesk services, training and technology solutions from subject matter experts in a huge variety of formats including video, text, code, FAQs, images, scripts, presentations, whitepapers, dashboards and more. Sources include consulting companies, system integrators, individual consultants, architects, engineers, project/program managers, analysts, academicians, end-users and developers. Founded in 2007, cumulusIQ operates a “cloud-based” model called KaaS (Knowledge as a Service℠), a 24/7 on-demand scalable alternative to traditional resource-constrained knowledge delivery methods. For more information, please visit cumulusIQ.com. or follow us on Twitter @cumulusIQ

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