eTap vs Kamar?

[Hon Tho]

Any reasons to choose eTap over Kamar, for a secondary school. The price charged for Kamar's filemaker install are horrifying.

Thanks much!

[Patrick Dunford]

eTap is web based, whereas it seems that a web version of Kamar is a long way off in the future. Similar factors have caused other SMSs to lose market share - Musac Classic has taken a long time to transition into Edge, and the initial advantages of RM Integris (the first SMS that met the Ministry's certification requirement) were lost when their G2 product was delayed.

On 18/09/16 13:04, Hon Tho wrote:

Any reasons to choose eTap over Kamar, for a secondary school. The price charged for Kamar's filemaker install are horrifying.

Thanks much!

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[Kent]

Hi Hon Tho,

1) eTap is a primary / intermediate school solution only.  eTap don't include support for NCEA, Pathways, Timetabling, period attendance. - all things which are part of a Secondary School.

2) Installation

- eTap has a one off setup cost or $1000 ($500 if < 100 students).  Rental + training and travel expenses are extra.

- KAMAR is a one-off setup cost of $6000, which includes setup, 12 hours on-site training (including expenses) plus initial rental.

3) Annual Rental

- eTap's pricing is $200 per classroom, starting from $880 pa (according to their web site).  (approx $8.00 per student per year )

- KAMAR's pricing is a base cost, plus a mix of student / teacher counts (overall approx $7.20 per student per year on-site, $13.50 per student hosted)

4) Training

- Both eTap and KAMAR charge the same hourly rate for training

Regards

Kent

KAMAR

Note:

• eTap pricing as available on their web site and based on an average class size of 25 students per classroom  (MoE Funding)

• KAMAR's pricing based on 780 students and 45 FTTE staff  (our average client school size)

On 18/09/2016, at 1:04 PM, Hon Tho <ho...@kiaatamai.org> wrote:

Any reasons to choose eTap over Kamar, for a secondary school. The price charged for Kamar's filemaker install are horrifying.

Thanks much!

[Hone Thomson]

Yup - NCEA

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[WHS Ict Technician]

>  (overall approx $7.20 per student per year on-site, $13.50 per student hosted)

$6 per year per student to host? Wow, that's a really significant cost.
Is that to deal with the bandwidth required for a Filemaker server/client relationship?

We can buy a new server every two years for that.

[Julian Davison]

Without commenting on the specific value of the 6$ increase, hosting involves a wide array of costs beyond the bare metal server. It's not entirely fair to directly compare one against the other.

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[Craig Knights]

I'd just like to put on here that the Kamar helpdesk is fantastic, best one I've ever used.

thanks guys and girls,

Craig

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[Kent]

Flow,

Hosting isn't just a server and some internet - there are a number of costs - such as location and power, hardware, networking, firewalls, storage, backups plus support of all of this.

Yes - you can always buy a server and install on site for a fraction of the cost - and that's always going to appear to be cheaper on the face of it as you aren't taking into account rack space, power, cooling, networking / firewall or support time - probably because you already have these in place and paid for.

Kent.

[Tim Harper]

Hi Kent,

your pricing response raises a few questions that are relevant to my school:

1.  is your hosting suitable for a school the size of Mt Aspiring College?  (approx 850 students.)  Do you see any speed-of-access issues?

2.  does your price include RDA access or is this via the FM Opener only?

3.  does the pricing include an IPSec tunnel back to the school - that allows a few other nice things to happen - eg use hmail to relay via N4L, access between the hosting and local AD..

4.  Where is your hosting?  Is it well connected to N4L?

5.  Do you have any recommendations about best methods of access in terms of circuit speed, potential QoS, firewall rules etc?

I certainly agree with your comments (and Julian's) that hosting does have a huge range of costs that need to be covered.

Finally - the obvious comment - schools are only going to use hosting if it is actually cheaper than purchasing, then running and maintaining the server on-premise.  Right now I can;t see why a school would choose hosting at a cost of $13.50 per student.  That is $11,475 per year or if the server were to last for 5 years a total cost of $57,375.  For that money my school could purchase an amazing server to use in-house, run it, back it up, maintain it etc - and still have change.  On top of that the server could also do lots more.  Like Flow I am not seeing that the price of hosting is at a point that is economic for a school.

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 03 443 5167 (messages cannot be left on this number)
Mobile 027 443 1236

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

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[WHS Ict Technician]

Hi Kent.

I've been the in the ICT game for a long time - dealing with  high volume, high value, high privacy data for a lot of it. So i've got a general idea of costs/ issues when dealing with enterprise scale operations.

That's why i was asking about bandwidth.

Rack space in a datacenter is reasonably cheap. There are fantastic economies of scale. KAMAR is on the low end of resource usage, both in terms of CPU cycles and storage. (I've been watching out KAMAR VM very carefully, to try and understand why the specification demands are so high)

The expensive part of the activity appears to be the data transfer.

I was just thinking that there must be smart ways to cut that down. Both in terms of the hosting cost, and the cost to the schools that have all their teachers jump onto KAMAR at the beginning of a class and then hammer their 'net uplinks.

So i was more trying to understand why the cost, and why the costs of local hosting are 'a fraction' of web hosting. In most models, web hosted solutions are _cheaper_

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[Patrick Dunford]

Any time you have the desktop database client talking to the server there is a lot of data transfer, a lot more than using a remote desktop server or web hosted solution. This is why when all our staff are report writing they complain the thing slows down. I watched the data transfer activity on our server and saw staff running some activity had peak traffic of 20Mbps for a few seconds and that was just one person, no wonder the server's network card was bogging down with the amount of traffic when they were all doing stuff at the same time.

This is essentially the same issue as when we were running (at another school) 20 teachers using Musac over a 10Mbps wireless link, were finding it quite slow.

The advantages of web based solutions in a nutshell are

- as the browser is essentially a dumb client, all of the data processing is happening on the server and only the results are coming back to the client to be displayed so there is much less bandwidth demand.

- can work with a wider range of devices running any operating system, obviously handheld comes to mind.

- no installation needed on any device therefore no maintenance.

Obviously a halfway measure has been to host on a remote desktop server, the major disadvantage is the desktop layout is not suitable for a handheld device with a smaller screen. Hence I do not regard hosting the SMS offsite on a remote desktop server to be an acceptable substitute for a web based solution.

Kamar already has a portal which is very limited, no one has said when this is going to turn into a full web based version. Musac did the same thing with their classic portals but at least they also had a web based version well along in development which I believe is now live. The best thing about Edge is restructuring their hideous un-normalised database to meet industry standards.

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[Simon - OBHS]

"hideous un-normalised database"

Ha, yes, that database structure still blows my mind that it worked.

[Chris O'Donoghue]

1st Disclaimer:

I currently work at Musac as the CTO.

I'd regard this web based summary as essentially true however still a 1/2 way house to more modern cloud based computing.

Cloud are normally focused around clear flexible APIs. Essentially the architecture separates out the data access, the business logic, terminated by API(s) and the UI/UX. So yes any end application should be able to access the APIs and present a solution to the customer. This does have some implications, such as data transfer to the browser again climbs as the display, sorting, process flow, etc is now all back in the browser. Of course this is done over standard protocols (normally JSON over https) so firewalls etc see it as simple web traffic. But some other things are much faster as a lot of local processing is done within the browser. YMMV!

These changes to modern computing are (as always) pushed along by economic trends, that bandwidth and processing power/storage tend to be cheaper over time.

At present in edge we are only part way on this journey from web based to fully cloud. But that is the technological part of the vision.

The comment around hideous un-normalised, I'd agree around the hideous thing, though would probably call this grown beyond stability over time. :) I do however disagree with the conflating of un-normalised as a bad attribute, there are many good reasons for an un-normalised DB, however transaction integrity is not one of them.

Chris

2nd disclaimer, I will not be working at Musac from the end of this month.

[Patrick Dunford]

It worked when Musac was the only thing using it :)

On 22/09/16 11:40, Simon - OBHS wrote:

"hideous un-normalised database"

Ha, yes, that database structure still blows my mind that it worked.

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[Patrick Dunford]

I would have done the same kind of thing (un-normalised) when I was just starting out in programming, but not after getting my diploma from the polytech. It's undoubtedly one of the reasons Musac failed the accreditation the first time (IMO).