Ah, the joys (and curses) of going international!
Every entrepreneur’s dream is to develop a company that has international reach and brand awareness. Having customs and clients in other countries and other continents is a testament to quality, ambition and sound business decisions.
However, one of the challenges in international business nowadays is the digital aspect, especially in those areas where time is everything and time zones are treated like actual walls and not imaginary lines on a globe.
Time Zone Trouble
For the sake of good communication (and in some industries, to be compliant with regulations), having the correct time with various software processing tasks can be vital when sharing information around the world from headquarters in Switzerland to a satellite office in New York, for example.
Oftentimes, however, time zones get in the way. It is not always enough to just base everything on UTC or GMT or whatever baseline time reference is used; “local” time often means much more and is much simpler. But software that is based in one place only uses the system clock that is available on the locally resident server, so only the time that is local to the server is used and the end-user in another country would have to do their own calculations to ensure proper time.
What are the Options?
There has been a common challenge with dealing internationally in the use of certain “time-sensitive” software. When the accurate local time is important for an end-user, companies have had a couple of options to try to solve the issue when the software won’t budge off the existing system clock on the native server.
One option has been expensive, and it involved installing a server in every time zone and setting up each as a “native” server from which n end-user in that time zone would then access the software and thus have the accurate local time stamp. Considering how expensive these enterprise servers can be, and you figure that some countries or regions (such as the European Union) have multiple time zones, the so-called cost of doing business skyrockets with this option. Because of course it’s not just the servers initially, but it’s also the maintenance of said servers to ensure they are working reliably for your company and your customers.
The other option, while not as prohibitively expensive, would require some very savvy software developers and architects on staff or available on contract – developing a proprietary management tool to navigate the various time zones. This would require a lot of man-hours to design, develop and de-bug such a tool.
Seems funny that we are such a “flat-earth” economy with reach around the globe, and yet time zones are such a digital mystery to solve. Surely there can be another option, right? Time zones have been around for centuries – they can’t be more mysterious than Stonehenge, can they?
Time Walls Become Time Zones
It can be frustrating to realize in some ways it is easier to travel across time zones than it is to hit a few keystrokes on a keyboard to operate in a different time zone. From a digital perspective, it’s like these zones have walls up and software users have to negotiate their way through a virtual Brandenburg Gate to get to the other side.
A new key to the gate has been found, and the time walls come down to once again create time zones.
This digital key is a new software innovation that creates “virtual clocks.” This single software platform can basically mimic, on a single server, the clocks that are all around the world. In one place, a company can produce accurate local timestamps for the end-user, and conduct various regression testing, all from the main office in a single time zone. Imagine your software running at headquarters in New York City, but a customer being able to access the software and receive a local timestamp in Beijing. Or Sydney. Or Moscow. Both of them – in Russia and Idaho.
This “virtual clock” software platform is called Time Machine, and it’s produced by Solution-Soft. It can take your software and your server and put it anywhere in the world without actually leaving your server room. It’s easy, convenient, and efficient to maximize your productivity and profit potential by greatly reducing overhead and labor costs in terms of developing and testing alternative software options.
Tear down those time walls and make them the time zones you see on maps with the most efficient software solution now available, Time Machine by Solution-Soft.