Self Storage Technology and Hardware help

[Samuel Lee]

I am new to the self storage business.  Please bear with me as I ask some stupid questions here.  I have an opportunity to have a complete technology overhaul (management, merchant, access control, gate) on my self storage property.   However when I did my research, there was not much competition other than Storable (EasyStorage, SiteLink, StorEDGE, sparefoot).  They pretty much monopolized the industry.  Although they won back to back ISS awards, the consensus is that their customer service is extremely horrible (especially StorEDGE).  This would be a problem, because I am very green here and definitely need some hand-holding during the implementation phase.  I thought about getting StoragePug and integrate it with SiteLink.  However SiteLink requires a PC running 24x7 which I want to stay away.  So I am stuck and would like to get some insights from other owners.

Also I am a bit confused on the components as well which vendors do what.  Based on my reading, it seems like that I would need a management platform (i.e., StoragePug, EasyStorage), an access control system (ie. SiteLink), a gate system (ie. Opentech, Spider), and the gate hardware (no idea here).  Does that sound about right?