Project Hosts
Delivering Customized Clouds for Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management Solutions

Scott Chapman, an avid jazz piano player recognizes that coordination, team work and delivery are essential to produce a great user experience, not only in a jazz performance but also in a cloud service. By focusing on these fundamental essentials and infusing them into his company’s work culture, Chapman continues to solve critical problems affecting the IT departments and business decision makers who manage complex projects and portfolios.

“Enterprise and government customers face enough business and technical challenges in their daily routine, the last thing they need is to burden their own internal IT resources and capital budgets with deployment and management of a Microsoft Project, Dynamics CRM, or SharePoint Private or Hybrid Cloud. We provide all the managed services that these organizations need to get up and running quickly with the customizations they require,” says Chapman. This is where Project Hosts comes into the picture. The company provides Custom Cloud solutions that deliver all of the time- and cost-saving benefits of the cloud, but with more security, functionality and performance than can be found in multitenant Public Cloud offerings.

“By deploying our PPM Custom Cloud solution on dedicated infrastructure for each customer, we’re able to deliver a more tailored and optimized experience for them,” adds Scott Chapman, President and CEO, Project Hosts. Project Hosts provides solutions in partnership with many of their ecosystem of PPM partners who provide add-on applications to extend the capabilities of Project Server in areas such as financial decision making, visual work¬flow, large program management, ideation, and organization or function-specific reporting. While lightweight versions of these partners’

applications are supported on Public Clouds, the robust and complete versions are available only with Private Clouds, whether hosted by the customer or by a cloud service provider like Project Hosts.

In one of the successful implementations by Project Hosts, AutoTrader, a leading online resource for car shoppers and sellers lacked a centralized solution to facilitate the overall management, visibility and control over of hundreds of ongoing projects by its employees and external contractors. Rather than deploy Microsoft Project Server on-premise, AutoTrader enlisted the help of Project Hosts to deploy and manage the solution in a dedicated Private Cloud. This enabled AutoTrader to focus their internal IT resources and ef¬forts on front office applications like their consumer website which is essential to generate revenue. With a managed cloud service provider supporting their Project Server Private Cloud, AutoTrader eliminated duplication, optimized their IT staff and costs, and enabled their organization to maintain a business focus.

Thanks to the flexibility of their Private Cloud, when AutoTrader wanted to move beyond just project status reporting, they were able to add in a financial forecasting tool that met AutoTrader’s growing needs and func¬tional capabilities, something that would not have been possible in a Public Cloud. The PPM Custom Cloud solution also integrated AutoTrader’s IT system with many data ties, enabling dynamic real-time dashboards, the ability to perform complex what-if scenarios and deliver master views.

Project Hosts also has solutions that are specifically tuned for U.S. Government agencies. “One of our initiatives is to supply Custom Clouds to the government sector. We are currently in the process of gaining FedRAMP authorization for our PPM, CRM and SharePoint environments. This will enable us to provide cloud solu¬tions to departmental agencies that must comply with the U.S. government’s Cloud-First initiative and mandate to use only FedRAMP authorized cloud service providers,” adds Chapman.