Hosting Services

The UK water industry presents some unique contradictions. On the one hand, its participants provide a vital service for the public and must conform to the same levels of stringent regulation and quality standards in doing so. Yet on the other hand, the scale of the companies providing this complex and high profile service vary widely - from thousands of employees and £billion+ turnover FTSE 100 corporations, to a handful of employees and a sub £500k turnover.

The fact that the companies, regardless of scale, must conform to the same performance measures also means that the same level of service is expected by the populations they serve. Echo's hosted services were initially developed with the billing needs of the smaller companies in mind. The success of the hosted billing arrangements we've delivered prompted an extension of the offering beyond RapidXtra®, into broader application hosting services.

Hosted services offer a different range of benefits to those from native integrated applications. Organisations who don't have the requisite scale to employ the in-house specialists needed to manage critical applications get all the benefits of ownership of powerful software, but without the same maintenance overheads, with reduced risk and without having to manage any associated third parties.

RapidXtra

The success of hosted services as a way of purchasing RapidXtra has been in the ability to offer an end-to-end industry leading solution without the need to invest in hardware or employ IT specialists. Hosted RapidXtra delivers all the same key, business critical functions and services, like annual billing and batch processing for example, with the added supporting benefit of system administration, technical support and a robust, secure and continuity managed service.