Exciting news at ThePort!  Historically ThePort has offered its services via a 100% SaaS model with our hardware stack sitting in a local Atlanta based datacenter.  We've had enormous success with our SaaS model; however, it's clear that many businesses are beginning to accept service via the cloud as a viable alternative to SaaS or even traditional On Premise delivery models.  As we continue to grow our service offerings to enterprise system vendors, we are very aware of the need to expand our delivery options to meet the need of a diverse customer base.  

Over the past few months we've taken a huge step in that direction by fully installing an instance of ThePort Social in Amazon EC2.  The deployment is complete and fully tested, but is currently utilized for internal testing and demonstration purposes.  At this time we have no plans to migrate any customer communities from our physical data; however, we are capable of hosting any new customer sites in the cloud.  The move has allowed us to certify that our technology works like a charm in the cloud.  As an added benefit we've also been able to certify running our platform with a SQL 2008 database, as opposed to our current production environment which runs on SQL 2005.  

Now that SaaS and Cloud delivery options have a nice fat check mark next to them, it's time to turn our focus to the next hurdle: On Premise installs packages.  We have a major release slated for Q2 this year to address that specific issue.  Many more details will be coming over the next few months.  In the meantime we will be hard at work to bring the same great collaborative tools we currently offer behind the firewall!