AppNeta, a provider of cloud-based performance management solutions, launched a partner program for MSPs that offers its service in a pay-as-you-use-it model.
The Boston-based company has about 400 MSP partners and was beginning to find that its growth was hindered by the lack of a recurring revenue model, said CEO Jim Melvin.
"It's been a barrier to second-tier growth. We have hundreds of partners that have purchased the technology to use it in many ways on-site when a customer would have problems. But a number of partners that embraced leaving it on-site was relatively limited. We were getting feedback that partners wanted to start using it with all clients," Melvin said.
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AppNeta's PathView Cloud network performance service allows MSPs to see across multiple customer infrastructures in one view and identify where problems are occurring and why, according to the company. The core technologies include path analysis (bandwidth monitoring), packet analysis, traffic analysis and device analysis.
"If you're a voice VAR or a videoconferencing VAR, those partners need to know how to make sure the apps are going to work. All apps are performance-sensitive and they depend on the carriers and the customers' network infrastructure to be successful," Melvin said. "It's a story told a million times over. The VAR delivers voice or video and the customer calls on day two to say, 'Why is this not working?' They blame the vendor but it could be their network guy made a change to the network and nobody knows, or the carrier made a change that caused a service disruption."
AppNeta's service helps identify and remedy those issues, Melvin said, and now it's available as a recurring service to customers, whereas in the past it was sold as a one-year, paid-up-front subscription.
"It's very low friction in terms of ease of use and it aligns to MSPs' billing processes," Melvin said.
Said Robb Corduck, vice president of AppNeta's regional partners business unit: "Many SPs sell enhanced support, professional services. This allows them to bake it into their offerings. It gives visibility to the client side. It really improves with stickiness to clients."
Chris Fedor, president of Bandwidth Management Group, a Hudson, Ohio-based solution provider, said his company has sold AppNeta's service on a recurring revenue model for some time, but it was a manual process that required his company to pay up-front costs.
"We were playing the bank for our customers. That was a good way to start but not very scalable. We're trying to take our [WAN bandwidth] services nationally now and we're looking for large growth the next 12 months. We would have had a hard time supporting that growth [under the old model]. We really appreciate what AppNeta's done here," Fedor said.
PUBLISHED OCT. 2, 2012
