The World (retail at least) Keeps Spinning

Firstly, complements of the season to all.

As with all companies in the business of EDI, at least some of our customers have continued to operate throughout the holiday season. In particular in the retail sector orders for goods to be delivered on all days are being processed, and at least one of the logistics companies that use our service were actually working from 6pm on 25th December.

Of course our servers operate on a 365 days per year basis, but certain customers require the comfort of a support contact available as well, which we provide. This is seen very much as an insurance policy and we hope it never needs to be called upon. Unfortunately this year, on 26th December it was. Not a problem with any of our servers, but because we monitor customers traffic we were able to alert a particular customer to the fact that their systems had failed and they had not sent some of the transmissions we had expected. Sometimes, because EDI is integral to a business, we can actually help users to see errors in other systems, before any other alert is raised, and it is great to be able to offer such help.

One other issue that has come to our attention is the practice of some other providers in charging for messages stored on their servers. A number of new customers this year have contacted us concerned about storage charges over the festivities. It appears that some of our competitors charge for holding messages that the customer does not download within 7 days. Whilst this does not effect users such as those detailed above, this would obviously cause extra cost for users if they are shutdown over the festive period. What an outdated practice. One would almost think that this was the equivalent of an EDI "Stealth Tax". We were able to put users minds at rest as we do not charge for storage of up to one year. Some of our users are saying this will save them several hundred pounds which is great. We want our users to be happy customers for years to come and being short sited for a few hundred pounds would be ridiculous. It would also appear to be at odds with our views that EDI should be Software as a Service and AS2 must be Free of Charge.

One day all EDI will be this way.