In The Zone Tennis manages a tennis centre and conducts group and private tennis coaching classes. In 2009, Kiong Software worked with In The Zone Tennis to develop not only a dynamic website but also a computerized solution to help In The Zone Tennis reduce the amount of manual administrative chores with running its business. For example, In The Zone Tennis wanted an online system that allows students and parents to register for classes on its website, thus freeing the coaches and staff from the chores of fielding phone enquiries and processing registrations and payments manually.

Challenge No. 1

In The Zone Tennis is a small and medium-sized business (SMB) and our challenge is to deliver a professional website and IT solution that meets our client's expectation.

Approach taken to overcome Challenge No. 1

Kiong Software continually keeps pace with the exciting changes in the IT world to bring the best technology to our clients. In delivering our solution for In The Zone Tennis, we have chosen to use to build the solution on proven Open Source softwares like the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, Apache Tomcat JSP container and Ubuntu Linux. In addition, we hosted the services on a cloud server at Rackspace^®. Cloud server offers a high level of hardware redundancy at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated server. As a result, our choice of using a cloud server to host the services has significantly reduced the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the solution for In The Zone Tennis because it does not need to bear the computer hardware cost of a dedicated server.

By using a combination of Open Source software and cloud server to host all the services, we helped In The Zone Tennis to reduce the cost of the solution to the bare minimum.

Challenge No. 2

In The Zone Tennis staff previously spent too much time and energy answering phone enquiries, processing class registrations and tennis court hiring. To make matter worse, many calls were missed when staffs were busy and this means lost opportunities and lost revenues.

Approach taken to overcome Challenge No. 2

To solve Challenge No. 2, Kiong Software proposed incorporating three features into the client's website. We proposed

• (i) an area on the website that allows visitors to submit enquiries;

• (ii) list all the class details on the website and build an online registration solution so that the students/parents can choose the right class and sign up online;

• (iii) incorporate a ground-breaking online court-booking solution in the website so that the public can see the courts availability and book the tennis court online.

The result of incorporating the above three features into the website is that they significantly reduced the amount of time our client spent answering phone calls and freed up more time for the coaches to coach. For the customers of In The Zone Tennis, having the three features means that they can now made enquiries and bookings 24×7.