SMS: Managing Networks, Managing Relationships

When it comes to working with systems management software (SMS) vendors, solution pro- viders are looking for two things: a powerful, yet flexible, product offering to go to market with, and a business partner who's cooperative and can help them make money.

Whether they're leveraging Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG product for a network operations center or building a client's network on top of Hewlett-Packard's OpenView platform, solution providers strive to build unsurpassed functionality. And they want to build it on platforms that can be easily integrated with other products.

But even if a product is tops in its field, it doesn't mean much if the accompanying partner support program isn't up to speed, solution providers say. In that respect, they want vendors that are accessible at all levels of their partner relationships and that keep them updated on what's going on from a marketing and sales perspective.

Here's a look at four successful network management companies and how they describe their experiences with different vendors' SMS offerings.

Niborex Stays Steady With Microsoft

Although Niborex, a Tampa, Fla.-based networking and integration company, has been a Microsoft partner for the past four years, president and CEO David Lane says his fruitful relationship with the software vendor goes back even further.

Lane had dealings with Microsoft while working at a consulting office in the early 1990s. When he left to form Niborex, he says, he started focusing more heavily on the Microsoft line.

Today, the company provides networking and integration solutions for small and midsize businesses with 2,000 or fewer seats. Its services include everything from back-office integration with Microsoft tools, such as Exchange and Messaging, to wide-area deployments of new technologies, such as Windows 2000.

And the Microsoft SMS product sits at the center of many Niborex projects.

"SMS is a great product for managing what's going on in your environment," Lane says. For instance, he says he frequently uses SMS to help clients get a better handle on the technology they have. "So if you're doing a migration from your current environment to, say, Windows 2000, you want to know what kind of hardware and software you have in place and who's running what," Lane says. "With SMS, you can do all those kinds of queries, and it also allows you to customize those queries to give you very specific reports."

Another strategy for Lane's company is leveraging SMS to help clients who already have a system in place and are interested more in overall management. "Then it's really a maintenance factor," Lane says. "How do you deploy software, get the new patches out there and build solutions from a central location to push the ever-changing wave of software in a controlled and manageable manner and from a central location? That's really key when we start talking about large organizations."

Niborex has worked with other network management products from companies such as HP, Spectrum and Tivoli, but he says SMS is the best bet for clients who want to control their desktop and server platforms as opposed to specific pieces of hardware.

Lane says his company also has benefited greatly from Microsoft's aggressive partner programs.

"The program itself has been fantastic," Lane says. "It gives us a level of access to Microsoft that your average consulting company or average Joe doesn't have. It gives us access to information, software tools and platforms ahead of time before anyone else. And if we have problems, we've got an 'in' there now to help resolve critical issues of what we are dealing with."

Maryville Technologies Turns To Tivoli

When judging the value of a prospective enterprise systems management partner, Maryville Technologies looks for two specific things: product flexibility and ease of integration. That's what attracted the company to Tivoli, an IBM subsidiary, and its Enterprise Solutions offerings four years ago, and it's what keeps the partnership going today.

The company, which was founded in 1994 to focus on enterprise systems management, works mainly with "upper-tier" companies in the financial, manufacturing, utility and telecommunications industries, as well as a number of SMB companies. While it does have a product resale unit, its revenue model is based around the sale of its overall engineering services.

"Our model is leveraged off the ISO model that defines what enterprise systems management is," says Marvin Johnson, director of client services for the St. Louis-based company. "We looked to establish a relationship with Tivoli because functionally it had solutions that hit every element of that ISO model. And it also provided a certain degree of integration across those areas."

In most cases, Maryville works with clients who are trying to get a handle on the availability of their systems and infrastructures, helping them from the requirements-definition phase all the way to tool selection and implementation.

"In a lot of cases, [our clients] have things they've homegrown," Johnson says. "But they don't want to get into a situation where they have only one guru for the code they've developed because if he decides to leave, then they are up the creek without a paddle."

Johnson says his company looks to work with solutions that are commercially available off the shelf and can support multiple platforms.

"That gives us flexibility if we decide to change the hardware platform from, say, a Sun to an HP, or from an HP to NT," he says. "That way we don't have to go back and reprise everything, and it also gives us the same level of functionality without having to send someone off to training again."

Johnson says Tivoli's flexibility and integration capabilities are among its greatest strengths, giving clients the ability to retain knowledge regardless of the underlying operating system they are using. "The integration that they are getting out of the box is something that is a value to our client base," he says. "In a lot of cases, clients struggle with the best-of-breed approach vs. the framework approach. In their minds, it's one or the other...I think a lot of clients value the fact that although Tivoli may not have the most bells and whistles in a specific silo, they can minimize the integration work."

In addition, Johnson likes that, unlike many best-of-breed approaches, partners and clients can call Tivoli directly as a single point of contact for problems and services.

While Johnson admits his company's relationship with the vendor has had its ups and downs during the past four years, the Tivoli partner program has been going through some changes recently he hopes will benefit his company moving forward.

"We went through a period where there wasn't a whole lot of interaction going on, but now we have dedicated resources assigned to us to help us both with demand generation and identifying technical resources required for future product enhancements and things of that nature," he says.

ConTech Zeroes In On Computer Associates

Bob Foley likes to say that his relationship with Computer Associates and its Unicenter TNG platform began as a by-product of fate.

Foley's company, Indianapolis-based ConTech, had been working since 1992 as a VAR for a company called Legent, reselling its data transport products. But things changed in 1995 when CA acquired Legent, and Foley's company suddenly found itself being folded into a whole new kind of channel family.

"We immediately were welcomed by the CA VAR program, which at that point was still in its early stages," says Foley, ConTech's president. "That was our first real contact with CA and our first real exposure to its Unicenter TNG family of products."

Foley says that because the bulk of ConTech's existing work revolved around remote-management solutions, the company saw CA's Unicenter TNG product as a huge opportunity to expand its existing solution offerings.

"We were like a guy with a hammer looking for a nail," Foley says. "We were very focused on providing solutions for remote clients,whether they are remote retail sites, ATMs or kiosks. At that point, we were just moving files back and forth, but we realized that if we took some of these parts of TNG, then we could do both device and application management for our remote-site customers, not just file movement."

ConTech was also impressed by CA's ability to integrate its successful standalone products into a single package so its partners can sell clients fully integrated management solutions. "We looked at a number of other products and felt Unicenter TNG was going to be the strongest player," Foley says.

The company currently leverages Unicenter TNG to offer remote-systems management services for clients like Long John Silvers restaurant chain, the TriCon fast food franchise company and Brookshire Grocery Stores.

The relationship between the companies has been going so well that ConTech remains a Unicenter-only shop. "I wouldn't have put all of our eggs into one basket if we didn't feel strongly about the partnership," Foley says. "The relationship has been very positive, and they have been very supportive of us."

CA has also afforded its integration partner the leeway to develop and label its own customized version of Unicenter, which it sells to clients as its proprietary PRSM solution. "We've taken Unicenter TNG and seven of its agents and offshoots, and we sell those with CA's blessing under our own name and with our own enhancements to them. So it's a very interesting kind of partnership" Foley says. He notes that the product has been so successful with clients that CA is now in the process of marketing the PRSM product to other clients as well.

But more than the product itself, it was CA's initial willingness to cooperate with a smaller partner that sold him on the exclusive partnership.

"We are a very small company in a narrow niche, but CA was willing to say, 'OK, go for it and we will partner with you,'" Foley says. "Sanjay Kumar [CA CEO] himself blessed us doing this. I'm not sure anybody else would have done that. I'm not sure we could have gotten enough mindshare at an IBM or HP to get somebody to look at it like that."

InoTech: In Praise of Hewlett-Packard

It's safe to say systems management company InoTech knows its way around Hewlett-Packard's OpenView platform. After all, the Fairfax, Va.-based company, which was formed in the early 1980s, was one of the first solution providers to join the OpenView partner program.

"We were one of the original 16 channel partners," says Erik Kerkhoff, InoTech's director of sales. "Obviously, as HP has expanded its products, we've taken on most of the ones we've found valuable to what we do for our customers."

InoTech focuses the bulk of its work on clients such as ISPs and telecommunications carriers such as PSINet and Cable & Wireless. While Kerkhoff says InoTech is not exclusive to any one platform when providing solutions for its clients, OpenView's flexible architecture often makes it the best bet for customers.

"Our method is to talk to our customers from a functional perspective,not from a product perspective," Kerkhoff says. "They may want to manage both NT and Unix servers and need access for four different departments. We architect a solution that is more focused on those requirements and their long-term management goals, so the thing we like about the Open- View suite has been its openness to different products."

Kerkhoff says that when working with ISPs and other large IT infrastructure companies, technology platforms rotate so quickly that it's virtually impossible to utilize a single framework. "It's much more functional to the customer and how they use the different solutions to use something that is much more open,especially when it comes to niche technology," he says.

While Kerkhoff says HP has a history of sometimes trying to exert too much control over its channel accounts, for the most part he likes working with the company as a partner. "I'd say they're one of the best, if not the best, overall," he says. "In certain regions of the country, its direct sales forces are much more integrated with the channel. In other areas, it's not integrated well at all."

Kerkhoff says HP is also making headway in its efforts to get the word out from both a sales and technical perspective. "Its Web seminars are pretty good, and it helps keep our salespeople out in the street as opposed to sitting in a training class," he says.

Where Kerkhoff thinks HP might be lacking, especially when compared to competitors such as CA and Tivoli, is in its marketing efforts, noting that the company doesn't do a lot to advertise its OpenView platform. "It does have a great brand strength in general, especially when someone goes in for a sonogram and sees HP and then goes in to print something and sees HP," he says. "But the OpenView stuff is only a small part of a $42 billion company. It's more of a flagship thing, and I don't think they are leveraging it enough."