Announcing Fieldmagic Cloud
We’ve been on a journey over the past couple of years at Fieldmagic and we’re finally ready to let you all in on what we’ve been working on. Put simply, we’ve completely re-architected the Fieldmagic platform to be cloud native, highly performant and with a completely redesigned, simpler user experience.
What benefits does this give me as a customer?
Before we get into the sales pitch, we’ll outline some of the key changes with the new architecture.
- We’ve completely redesigned the user experience. We’ve focused on making the system intuitive while maintaining and enhancing the capability of the platform. From the single sign in with Google Apps and Office 365 to the design of every element within the user experience, we’ve obsessed about the user experience.
- Our new platform is cloud native and multi-tenant. As a customer, this means your upgrades are constant and invisible and we’re constantly monitoring and performance tuning every part of the platform.
- We’ve dropped prices across the board and introduced entry level pricing that allows small businesses to access CRM and Field Service Management starting at $29 per month!
- The system is designed to not require implementation services. Built in step by step user guides and free support - we want to make the system accessible to every business, big or small. If you want implementation, we’re here to support you, but it’s not strictly required.
- We have multi-lingual support out of the box and on every part of the system, from the desktop experience to the PDF designs to the mobile app. In locations where there are multiple languages, this is critical.
- We have true offline access for the mobile app. We chose to leverage an offline native mobile technology that means that all data is cached offline and users can log time entries, log materials and inspect assets offline.
- We’ve already introduced new features and have more coming. From our new QR code asset tracking on our mobile app to our zero setup email communication tracking with clients, we’re already able to offer more value to our customers. Watch this space.
- We’re able to offer single click, free integration with most popular accounting systems. We’re starting with Xero, MYOB and Quickbooks, and estimate that we’ll have another 3-5 by the end of the year.
- You get all of the flexibility of having a CRM at the core of the platform, including a studio that allows you to tailor your system to your requirements.
Put simply, we’re able to offer more value for less $$.
We’ll be adding a lot more detail over the coming weeks as we outline each of the major improvements that come with the new platform. Feel free to sign up to the new platform by clicking on the Free Trial Link. You don’t need to create an account to log in - just use your Google or Microsoft account to create a free account.
A Bit of History about Fieldmagic
For those that are not existing customers of Fieldmagic, we’ll provide a bit of history of the product. Fieldmagic was created by CRM Online Australia, a customer relationship management consultancy based in Australia. CRM Online has been implementing CRM since 2006 and over that time, has implemented hundreds of CRM, enterprise integration and marketing systems in regions including Australia, Europe, Asia and the USA. As tends to happen over time, we started to gain more customers in certain industries than others, and Field Service Management was one of those areas where we found that a lot of customers were searching for a solution to better understand and service their customers, which is the point of customer relationship management.
A CRM system is typically focused on sales, marketing and customer service, but doesn’t typically do Field Service Management as well as a tool designed for that purpose. As a result, many of these customers were also running separate Field Service Management systems, which meant that those systems needed to be integrated with those existing systems (typically involves significant $$$) or alternatively, accept a more limited level of field service management within the CRM.
In 2015, we set out to change that by creating the best of both worlds. Our goal was to create a complete Field Service Management platform built on a CRM platform at its core. We chose to build that platform on SugarCRM Enterprise, a popular and full featured CRM platform at the time. This gave us a strong advantage over many traditional products in the FSM space around the CRM capability - management of sales, flexible reporting, an entire ecosystem of integrations and addon products that could be used to tailor the product to each customer. The result was that we had some success in that space, but this also came with some drawbacks - cost, ease of maintenance, limitations around product roadmap to name but a few.
We used the valuable knowledge that we gained with our customers in the SugarCRM-based version of the product and completely re-architected the platform to create Fieldmagic Cloud, a multi-tenant CRM, Field Service and Asset Management platform with a strong focus on user experience and offering exceptional enterprise grade features to customers at an accessible price point while being intuitive enough to support self implementation for smaller csutomers.
The technical stuff
From a platform standpoint, we’re able to offer a more reliable, feature rich platform.
- We constantly monitor and tune for performance. A key benefit of multi-tenancy, is that we fully manage all aspects of performance, allowing us to ensure that the system is performant at all times. We’ve load tested the system to 500 million jobs because if the system performs well as 500 million jobs, it’s certainly going to perform well for each customer’s smaller data set.
- We’ve designed the platform natively for the cloud. That means lightning fast performance and high availability across the entire platform at no extra cost. Our data store is low cost and replicated into multiple locations, meaning that we can offer virtually unlimited storage for our customers.
- The new platform is designed around continuous deployment. The software engineers in the room will know what this means, but for the customer, this translates to fast, regularly, highly reliable updates to the product and regular new features.
- Our devops allows us to add automated unit testing for every part of the platform as well as automated mobile and app testing, which need to complete successfully before every deployment.