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August 21st, 2018 - Posted by Ben Thomson, Director of Operations

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I am a child of the 80’s (OK I was born in 1978 but who’s counting?!). My love of all things geek began from the moment I was lucky enough to get a ZX Spectrum and quickly followed by my beloved Amiga. Back then you dealt with the never-ending load times, the little eccentric ways of getting games to load… using these things called “tapes” for my younger readers!

They were fraught with issues. Games took 20 minutes to load, if you were lucky, and if not so then they didn’t work at all and for no reason. The screeching sound of a tape loading will haunt me forever.

Then came disk-based systems. These offer huge (!!) storage of either 720kb (that’s kilo-byte) or a whopping 1.44Mb if double capacity. They brought with them faster load times, however they also took issue with any form of dirt or scratching. How many floppy disks have you had to throw away? It’s into the hundreds for me.

Fast forward a number of decades and things have moved on considerably. We still use the disk-based system in standard hard drives, although almost everything has moved towards solid state technology. No moving parts! Brilliant. Rapid load times, no issues with environmental factors. Very small. Awesome.

But as one door closes another opens. With most things using solid state setups, it’s also brought along the idea of a constant need to update software or that killer other type of update… firmware!! How many times have you purchased an electrical item and one of the first things you have to do is update the firmware. What about your mobile phone, how many updates has that had since you owned it? Worse still, how many of you wish you could undo the latest update as it caused you no end of issues?

It used to be that I could sit using a Windows desktop and if a program caused me an issue, a quick CTRL + ALT + DELETE would give me the ability to shut down the offending program. I can’t do that on my TV now can I?

It’s the same with Web to print software. It used to be the case that this would have been a hosted solution, well maybe in the dark ages. Imagine the joys of trying to keep both the operating system and web to print software running. When one updates, the other plays catch-up. Or in real-world cases, simply stops working.

That’s why when you choose a solution provider it makes a lot more sense for that to be cloud-based or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). That means you don’t care about the underlying operating system, conflicting software, firmware or any other type of “-ware”… as long as it loads in your choice of browser, who cares?

Here at RedTie we have only ever developed SaaS based software and have done successfully for over 15 years. You worry about the important things such as selling print, and we will worry about the underlying hardware and software. As that child of the 80’s I can tell you this way of working gives you much more freedom to do the things that are fundamental to your business. Be confident RedTie is an expert in cloud-based software….

Now I have to run, I think that Chuckie Egg has finally loaded on my Speccy 48K. No, wait. It’s crashed!!