Quest Software's PacketTrap group is set to launch on April 15 PacketTrap MSP 6.0, an upgraded version of its remote monitoring, management and service delivery platform for MSPs.
Version 6.0 includes an antivirus solution, a global policy management tool that has built-in, pre-configured service level agreements for MSPs and streamlines daily network monitoring and management, according to Matt Bolton, divisional vice president of product management for the Network Management Division at Quest Software, based in San Francisco.
The anti-virus component arrives through a new partnership with Vipre Antivirus from GFI Software, which partners can brand as their own solution, Bolton said.
"It's not like we're monitoring a third-party antivirus. It's right in the solution," he said. "The the smart system management allows users to have an MSP platform out of the box. If a customer wants to offer platinum, silver or bronze levels, we built that into policies to say, 'Here's the data I collect. Here's the alerts to do.' and the system learns the behavior of [end users] when they deviate from a norm."
Also in PacketTrap MSP 6.0, MSPs can create custom reports and desktop gadgets through a wizard process and support Cisco Systems' Nexus switches and VMware ESX and ESXi, which gives MSPs the ability to offer services for a virtualized environment.
"It creates templates to mirror back to best practices and gives you the ability to deloy over all clients," said Mike Byrne, director of MSP for the Network Management Division at Quest Software.
The SLAs allow MSPs to marry feature sets in a scalable manner to reduce their own set up costs, Byrne said.
"They won't be hemorrhaging all the margin," he said. "Everyone on the PacketTrap team has worked in the channel. We've walked that mile in the MSP's shoes."
Matthew Parades, president of Central Valley Networks, a Fresno, Calif.-based MSP, was already selling Vipre nodes through PacketTrap on an ad-hoc basis and said a more integrated version will help his business. "It will help a lot with manageability and it's another product we can offer to [customers] without them having to worry about renewing licenses. We can take care of that and renew for them," he said. "That's something we've asking for a while."
He added that global policy management will help him be more efficient on the back end too. "Anything we can do globally instead of going to each customer is great. It helps out and keeps everybody on the same configuration, the same everything."
