Jersey Shore FCU Finds Happiness Is a Warm Server Located in Virginia

NORTHFIELD, N.J. — When Audrey Gentile sends one of her board members an e-mail showing, say, loan portfolio performance, she opens up her Outlook program, attaches the Excel file and off it goes.

Nothing unusual there, except that Gentile's at her desk at $82 million Jersey Shore Federal Credit Union in South Jersey and the Microsoft Office software she's using is actually humming away on a server in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Vienna, Va.

Jersey Shore FCU runs the backbone of its daily business operations through a virtual private network that connects it to ProNet Technologies. The firm calls the service Hosted Hard Drive and it's pretty self-descriptive. The crucial software resides offsite and is maintained, upgraded and generally tended to by people who focus on doing that task for a collection of clients.

In industry parlance, this arrangement has sometimes come to be called “software as a service,” or SaaS, for short.

But to Gentile, the credit union's CFO, it's no mere jargon.

“They are our IT department,” Gentile said of ProNet Technologies and its president/CEO Dan Hine.

Indeed, the 38-employee CU now has its internal IT staff downsized to one person, a network administrator. Gentile said another former IT employee has seen his job duties change focus since ProNet was brought in.

“We needed someone to handle our security and facilities onsite and that employee has since been promoted,” she said. “He handles everything from building maintenance to security control and training.”

The arrangement with ProNet also saves on hardware costs as well as licensing and upgrades. The 10,000-member CU is connected to its vendor through a secure VPN, Hine said, and while he normally recommends a thin-client setup to his clients, in this case, Jersey Shore FCU kept many of its original desktop PCs.

Gentile said, “We've been able to stop buying hardware and are not constantly putting money into servers and the equipment room. Our NA [network administrator] now can concentrate on internal support concerns as well as projects such as working on our risk-assessment plans and creating our intranet.”

Another advantage of the current setup is “roaming profiles.”

“That means I can work at any of our three branches, enter my user ID and password, and my files appear just as I left them back on my desktop in my office,” Gentile said. “That was a problem for us before. We would try to have people work at different offices, and they wouldn't be able to access e-mail or other information they needed to have. It just wasn't very efficient, having everyone's desktop essentially so different.”

That solved, ProNet and Jersey Shore FCU are now working on implementing a document-imaging and storage platform that will, for instance, allow loan officers to pull up documents regardless of their location.

Another project involves moving an existing ProfitStar asset liability management software package onto the ProNet's remote infrastructure. (A recent Forrester Research report found that human resources, CRM and collaboration software are the mostly widely deployed SaaS applications among enterprises in North America and Europe.)

Jersey Shore FCU runs on a USERS Inc. core processing platform, but “we really don't get involved in the core processing software for credit unions,” Hine said. “Our focus with all of our clients is hosting Windows-based applications.”

He added,” We really feel like we've become an extension of Jersey Shore's team. We're truly just a phone call away.”

Hine said his client base of about 50 is an eclectic bunch.

“We have credit unions, a small bank, veterinary hospitals, attorneys, businesses from a lot of different walks of life,” he said. “Nobody is too big or too small for us.”

Gentile said she became aware of ProNet when she met another ProNet credit union client at a USERS Inc. conference.

“I started asking a lot of questions because this was something our CEO had been looking for and later met Dan,” she said. “After the interview process and vendor research, Dan provided our credit union with a full presentation and proposal. We found what we were looking for as far as a SaaS provider and a vendor that shared our credit union philosophy of people helping people.

“Software as a service has really helped us, since we're an organization where so many people wear so many different hats, and it's really hard at our size to get the technical expertise we need to support that.”

–mrapport@sc.rr.com