Laserfiche Cloud from Ricoh

I asked a question on a popular Copier tech website about selling SaaS in lieu of a traditional “hardware + software + service contract managed by a local technician”.

The response was:

Re: SaaS (Software as a Service)
If you're selling it to them, they will look to you for all support issues on it. Often I've found cloud services still to be much more hype than anything else. There are plenty of instances of outages even by Amazon and other firms handling these services. I'd much rather have an onsite method of storage with the cloud as backend available for archival data. You're looking at a very thin line overall: the cloud provider has a vested interest in keeping support as much in their sphere as possible while just giving out enough information to get your techs on the line with them and go through very basic potential issues. Furthermore, with the added variables of the client's internal network, ISP, and the cloud provider's uptime being parts of the equation it quickly gets out of the range of the technician.

You'd be better served selling some good capacity servers for onsite data retrieval rather than relying on a third party to do the dirty work.

These same techs went onto say that Ricoh Document Mall, which is basically a SaaS DMS solution, was very unstable and overpriced.

Very well said.

I've used DocumentMall on many occassions, in the early going, yes there were some issues. However in the last four to five years, I've never had a an issue when I used it.

Overpriced? Yes, if you're just looking at it for storage, however it is a robust cloud document management solution and you get what you pay for.