ACT! Is one of the most complete contact and customer relation ship management software for small and midsized business. Today's business environment requires most proactive approach regarding customer handling but also customer retention and better customer interaction and forecasting is needed.  The enterprise customer management needs may be listed as:

• Real time access to the customer experience data to all teams such as sales, marketing and strategic
• Analysis of the potential customer behaviour in terms of customer buying history, customer preferences
• Informed customer interaction process where the team is well aware of the individual customer traits
• Business forecasting  for the services offered by an enterprise, strategic market needs analysis

ACT! CRM software helps to enterprise to meet these needs of enterprise. Coupled with the customer handling experience enterprise today are also hard pressed in terms of:

• Reducing the IT costs overhead and application management costs
• Want anytime anywhere access to the database so that collaboration among different teams and users is in real time
• Better security for their data
• Better utilization of the existing workforce for enhancing the core business focus rather than putting them in unrelated IT functions and support

Keeping these objectives of enterprises, particularly the small and medium business consideration of alternative to desktop base ACT! CRM access is worthwhile.

Reason behind ACT! Hosting

The enterprises have realized the benefits of Cloud based application access and are willing to shed Many IT infrastructure management and support functions to specialized service providers. Some of the reasons that drive enterprises towards ACT! Hosting is:

Need for reducing IT costs: With ACT! Hosting the enterprises gets to use a ready made IT infrastructure which is available on demand, platform and browser independence. This means that what ever the application they are using besides ACT! CRM they do not need to create specialized IT application for each application. Thus there is a degree of application compatibility in the IT infrastructure.

Further IT costs are reduced on account of:

• Minimum system configuration needed for accessing ACT! CRM software: Since the application is installed and run on terminal servers and a centralized database exists, lees consumption of memory and CPU are required at individual systems, leading to minimal system requirement for running the software. This also means doing away with system and server upgrades frequently and in the process saving IT costs.

• Support and maintenance provided by the service provider:  with ACT! Hosting most of the application management and troubleshooting functions are outsourced to the service provider and they ensure that the application is maintained and managed in most optimal condition.
• Application installation and upgrades are easy due to centralized access and more ever it is the service provider functions rather than the enterprise.
• Scalability issues: With Terminal server hosting the enterprises no more required to provision beforehand in anticipation of increasing number of users. Since any number of users can be added on the terminal server at a short notice, no investment in the IT is required.

Unleashing the power of multiuser collaboration

ACT! Hosting and in fact any application hosting services brings innumerable benefits to the user in terms of alternative mode of application access.

• No more tied to the office premise: With ACT! Hosting services the application can be accessed from anyplace anytime in a multiuser mode so that real time collaboration and sharing becomes a possibility. So whether it is sales team or marketing team all have access to the latest customer data which empowers them to have more informed customer interaction experience.
• Share and exchange file on the Go: ACT! Hosting allows application access not only from any system independent of platforms used but allows sharing and exchange of files even when various users are remotely connected.

High speed application access: Reduced system requirement and high technology terminal servers ensure that the application performance and access is enhanced in a hosted environment. Further cloud environment involved effective load balancing between multiple servers that is not possible at the local level.

Easy application management: In desktop based deployment a copy of the application is installed on each computer, user preferences set and also IT management is done for each system leading to high variability in each system and application performance from one user to another. With centralized terminal server deployment, central application management ensures that users have the most optimal application access experience.

Data security with ACT! Hosting

ACT! Terminal server hosting also allows better data security with encrypted data transfer, authentication based database access and use of latest security tools for real time network monitoring.  Further security of the network arises form the ability of the administrators to centrally set common user preferences, password protected access and use of firewalls.