Adar Unveils Channel Program For Its Nerdio ITaaS Platform

Adar, the developer of the Nerdio IT-as-a-service platform for managed service providers, is launching its first official channel program as a way to provide improved benefits to partners.

The new channel program, unveiled at this week's NexGen cloud conference, was developed specifically with managed service providers in mind, said Vadim Vladimirskiy, CEO of the Chicago-based company.

Adar understands the requirements of managed services providers in large part because it was one itself, Vladimirskiy told CRN.

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By 2010 the company had built its own infrastructure-as-a-service platform, including a variety of on-line services, and realized it had a technology that would be helpful to other MSPs, Vladimirskiy said.

"We used our knowledge and experience as a service provider to build a platform for other IT services companies to offer," he said.

Included in the Nerdio platform is virtual desktop infrastructure and server virtualization incorporating VMware technology, Microsoft Office 365, backup and disaster recovery in partnership with Nimble Storage, and a complete security suite featuring Kaspersky anti-virus, Fortinet firewalls, Kaseya patch management, Mimecast spam filtering, and more, Vladimirskiy said.

While MSPs could assemble such a package on their own, there is no one that puts it all together like Adar does with Nerdio, he said.

"Our Nerdio Administration Portal, or NAP, automates the deployment of these services," he said. "We have engineers who put this together. Provisioning and deployment of these services is normally a manual process taking days or weeks. We automate the process."

Nerdio is available in three standard packages, based on a client's configuration, with billing done on a monthly basis, Vladimirskiy said.

The new Nerdio partner program provides partners with margins starting at 40 percent, said James Sivis, vice president of marketing at Adar. "How do we do that?" Sivis said. "We built this as a self-service portal, and everything is automated."

The program includes full collateral and marketing support, a lead-generation program designed to bring leads to partners, sales and engineering support, full lifecycle partner support, and dedicated sales reps to work with partners, Sivis said.

"This comes from our having been an MSP," he said. "We didn't come from the vendor side. We know the market, the issues, the TCO [total cost of ownership] requirements."

Adar does with its Nerdio platform what very few companies can do, said Jesse Phillips, managing partner at Certified Network Associates, an Orlando, Fla.-based MSP and Adar channel partner.

"It's a very automated platform," Phillips told CRN. "They have invested in an architecture that is really easy to use. I'm impressed with the amount of work they do with on-boarding and automating. It takes a lot of work off partners' shoulders."

Certified Network Associates has its own desktop-as-a-service offering for its small business clients, but found it difficult to scale, Phillips said. It also looked at other platforms like Amazon, but found them hard to scale and hard to partner with. "Nerdio fills out that picture for us," he said.

Adar's channel program allows Certified Network Associates to focus on its own value add, Phillips said.

"We can focus on what we're good at: Be the boots on the ground for clients without having to worry about support," he said. "Nerdio lets us manage our relationships with customers and handle their support without worrying about the infrastructure."

The platform is dubbed "Nerdio" for a reason, Sivis said.

"We take great pride in being tech nerds," he said. "We've helped companies by being so technical. And the name positions us as a company that customers can rely on. Who do you call if you need IT help? A tech nerd."