An Interview with Ubersmith

ubersmith

For those in the web hosting industry, the Ubersmith brand is well known. At eBridge we’ve grown accustomed to seeing the Ubersmith team at industry events, and we’ve grown familiar with the Ubersmith tool itself by working on our hosting clients’ websites. But Ubersmith’s products have applications in industries other than hosting as well.

Dan Brenner, Director of Solution Architecture at Ubersmith, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about Ubersmith, its services, and future plans.

Why are Ubersmith’s subscription billing and other services popular among web hosting companies?

The number one reason why web hosting companies find Ubersmith so useful is the context we provide for their businesses. Our unique feature set allows hosting companies to monitor their devices, deploy virtual machines, track usage, and invoice their clients in many different ways. Imagine being able to do fifteen minutes of configuration up front and then bill automatically for bandwidth usage forever. When support issues arise, Ubersmith allows them to track the lifecycle of a ticket and clearly understand their customers’ current configuration and history. All of these linked sections encourage total awareness and control of the many moving parts of any business.

Ubersmith’s Client Manager

Besides hosting, are there any particular industries that benefit from Ubersmith?

Absolutely. We have customers in many different industries: software and SaaS companies, cloud service providers, real estate, and energy providers, you name it. Any company that needs to do subscription billing can use Ubersmith to their advantage – that’s our core competency. If they need to bill dynamically for usage, even better, because we’ve solved that problem as well. Although billing is our primary focus, the other aspects of our software provide so much context in conjunction with each other that the power of the entire product can be very compelling. Our support ticketing can be automated in so many ways to better serve end users. Our order and device management tools enable companies to automatically deploy services from a sales quote or public order form easily. Effectively, any company that needs to fulfill orders, provision services, invoice for them and report on them later will find Ubersmith indispensable.

How have you seen your industry change over the past few years?

Clearly, there’s been an exodus away from traditional shared hosting and toward cloud services. This shift is nothing brand new, but it’s truer than it ever was before. The rise of platforms like AWS and Azure has changed the landscape considerably. While there are still people running shared hosting businesses, the margins are thin, and many people find the cloud preferable for a multitude of reasons. The distributed and scalable nature of cloud-based services allows for much better handling of traffic spikes and other transient events, and uptime for applications hosted in the cloud tends to be quite good. Serving up data from different sources based on location is another performance boost. Finally, the pay-as-you-go nature of services in the cloud allows both providers and customers to bill and pay for exactly what has been used; no more, no less.

Are there any new features coming soon that you’re allowed to talk about?

Of course – we’re always working on new features! Some of the landmark features that have just shipped in v4.1 include:

  • A usage-based billing framework, which allows our customers to more easily bill for any kind of usage
  • Easy to use self-installer, which enables automatic configuration and installation of Ubersmith via Docker
  • Enhanced rack management capabilities, for tracking data center equipment in greater detail

Features planned for later this year include:

  • A Salesforce integration with 2-way synchronization
  • More customizable invoices and quotes
  • Architectural enhancement to increase scale and system efficiency (like parallel processing of invoicing and monitoring, etc.)
  • A new plugin system, which will enable easier custom integrations with third-party systems for developers, and allow more hooks into Ubersmith system-wide

How can our readers learn more about Ubersmith?

The best place to learn more is our website: https://ubersmith.com

For those who want to learn more about Ubersmith in depth, I would recommend perusing our knowledge base here: https://docs.ubersmith.com

Please feel free to reach out to us if you’d like to schedule a demo call and/or get hands-on with a trial version.

Do you need a new website that’s streamlined to work with Ubersmith, an update to an existing website, or new marketing ideas to promote your business? Contact eBridge Marketing Solutions today.

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About the Author:

As eBridge’s VP of Operations, Devin Rose brings marketing expertise and an entrepreneurial knack to the eBridge team. Devin holds a Bachelor of Commerce Degree from Royal Roads University and a Marketing Management Diploma from the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

Posted June 22, 2017
Categories: eBridge Marketing Solutions' Blog, General Business
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