Ingram Adds Enterprise Managed Services With Nimsoft

Nimsoft, based in Redwood City, Calif., is focused on midmarket and enterprise products and fills a hole in Seismic's portfolio in that regard, said Justin Crotty, vice president of services, North America, at Ingram Micro.

"A lot of our partners are deploying managed services into their SMB customers and are starting to look upmarket for the tools and capabilities that allow them to get into those networks," Crotty said.

Ingram's Seismic catalog offers managed services solutions from about a dozen other companies, but most are focused on the small-business or Windows server/desktop space, Crotty said.

"We have longstanding investment in LPI [Level Platforms Inc.] and that's not changing. But Nimsoft brings a midmarket and enterprise capability to the table. It's differentiated from a lot of SMB network solutions out there," he said.

Nimsoft's offering will be called Seismic Enterprise Monitoring powered by Nimsoft within Ingram Micro.

"They have robust reporting ability, monitoring and remediation capability in those [midsize and enterprise] environments," he said. "Generally speaking, the SMB monitoring tools are server/desktop focused. As you get into the networking space, they start to have challenges. Nimsoft has an elegant, robust offering targeted at the midmarket." Ingram Micro will target select solution providers that play in the higher-end networking space rather than try to market it to a large volume of partners, he said.

"We had partners encourage us to take a look at it. They were asking our opinion, [asking] 'Are they any good?' Customers lead you down certain paths. We hear good things about [Nimsoft] and we've seen more partners try to win [managed services] business in that space," he said.