PerformanceIT Offers Easy Path to Managed Services

Company: PerformanceIT

Headquarters: Atlanta

Technology Sector: Services

Key Product: ProactiveWatch

Year Founded: 2001

Number of Channel Partners: More than 100 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Managed Service Provider

Why You Should Care: ProactiveWatch provides flexible SaaS monitoring and management and offers integrated smartphone access to resolve customer IT problems instantly from any device with an Internet connection.

The Lowdown: One good thing about being a small company is the flexibility to be responsive to customer and partner needs. Such is the case for hosted network management services vendor PerformanceIT, according to one MSP working with the company.

While some MSP platform vendors can take more than a year to upgrade their software, PerformanceIT does not, said Mike Morlock, director of engineering at Globalquest Solutions Inc., a Williamsville, N.Y.-based MSP.

"They will build code around my business. If there's something I need for my clients, something that I would do for all my clients, they do that in the next release. And we usually see something within three months, which is unusual in this business," Morlock said.

Michael Mittel, president of PerformanceIT, Atlanta, believes it's simply

PerformanceIT ProactiveWatch

better to get things done more quickly, which is why his ProactiveWatch offering performs a health check every 10 seconds on monitored devices, while other solutions pull data every five to 15 minutes.

"You get great granularity. Within 30 to 60 seconds, we can say here's when there's a problem. The other thing we do is we take a snapshot to provide to the service provider so they know exactly what's going on at the time of the alarm and can get to the root cause for their clients," Mittel said.

PerformanceIT is also going mobile, with the release of FreeMyIT, which enables MSPs to perform status verification, diagnostics and remediation on remote servers and network devices through mobile devices such as RIM BlackBerries or Apple iPhones. "You can manage [customers'] environments from any handheld device with Internet connectivity," Mittel said.

"Both of these are hosted up front. We don't require any long-term contracts [or] commitments. It's a month-to-month service. For a few hundred dollars a month, you're up and running your clients," he said.