Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How can I get more information about whether or not you can help us?

Call us for an appointment. By phone or in person, having a good discussion about your database and analysis needs is a great way for us to determine if we can help. Debi Parcheta makes herself available for you free of charge, so don't hesitate to ask for an appointment. If you need her to fly in for a day of conversation at your place of business, normal travel reimbursement will be required. Contact us directly at info@blue-marble.com.

I don't even know where to start. Should I call you anyway?

Definitely! This is actually a common problem. We have lots of questions for you, too. Just start talking. Our trained database engineers are going to ask you enough questions to determine how to help. If you don't need us at all, we will tell you. If you need to be referred to another kind of company, we will help you get to the right services. If we can help, we will tell you how and we can estimate some costs for you up front.

Will I have to buy expensive database management system programs to run a database?

That depends on what your database problem is. If this is a new database, we could look at open source products for you which will eliminate dbms costs altogether. You may decide to pay some hosting costs and use a server that already has those products working for you. Hosted servers are very cheap -- $8 - $100 per month, again depending on the software problem we are trying to solve. If you are working with an existing database, you might need to continue to update the dbms that it is built on and costs will depend on the vendor. Oracle is the most expensive platform that we see and Microsoft products are the most prevalent systems that many new clients already own. Sometimes it's as simple as giving us access to your current system which costs you nothing. Blue Marble maintains a variety of dbms program environments to work with many clients.

I don't know if I can afford a database. How can I tell?

The average new database costs about $12,000 - $15,000 to build, although each project varies and occasionally, a company comes to us in a growth spurt and describes 40 or 50 things that their new database must do. Obviously, those will cost 5 or 6 times what a database with fewer functions would cost.

Consider the benefits of using a database.

Will spending $15K now save you from hiring a person to keep up with paperwork or processing? Even a temp worker can cost $28K per year, so a database would save you $13K.

Are you losing your competitive edge and therefore about to lose customers? If a database can help you to be faster or to add more customers to your business easily, you will get the cost of development back in a short amount of time and then it's all profit from there.

Can you afford to lose your 3 best customers? Would the pain of losing them cause you to commit to getting your database working so that you are their vendor of choice?

Consider competition. Is anyone out there gathering customers faster than you are because they have more information or use it better or faster? If an efficient database can double or triple the number of customers that you take on each month, would that additional revenue pay for the database in a short amount of time?

Call us to help with a cost/benefit analysis if you are not sure. Sometimes a stepped approach to designing a database can be the right strategy to improve your bottom line and spread the costs over time.

Does Blue Marble sell data too?

Our primary business is the design and development of databases. We also offer data processing and data analysis services. Beyond that, our customers usually have data that they are working with and they provide it to us for their database services. If you need to procure data we can help with identifying how and where the best data could be purchased.

How does that virtual office work out for you?

Pretty well actually. Most of our clients are spread far and wide, from New York to California. There are a lot of good reasons that we like our virtual office arrangement. Certain jobs, like engineering databases or doing data entry are greatly improved in speed and accuracy when employees don't interrupt each other. Our employees stay longer because they like working from home. We facilitate the virtual office environment with extra technology that allows us to serve the customer in the same way that an in-office worker does. We also maintain a small 3 - 4 workstation office where employees can have team meetings and work together as needed on a project.

How does the virtual office benefit your customers?

The virtual office helps us to retain experienced employees which cuts our training costs. We also have a lower overhead because our small physical office does not significantly impact our budget. In those 2 areas alone, we are able to keep our costs lower than competitors. That's how Blue Marble delivers more than its competitors, for less.