Hot Market: ScienceLogic Bets On Video Managed Services
ScienceLogic service provider customers can now offer single-system management and deploy managed video services for video systems by Cisco, Polycom and LifeSize, including hardware endpoints and hosted infrastructure. The ScienceLogic platform offers video asset and inventory management, health and availability, call detail, historic call analysis, and customizable reporting and dashboards.
Video managed services is a rapidly growing market for service providers looking to expand their video footprints, and for enterprise-focused VARs and integrators looking to move beyond the saturated market for video endpoint and infrastructure resale. Several of the country's top video-focused solution providers, including Dimension Data, AVI-SPL, Yorktel and IVCi, have made moves in the past year to expand their video managed services capabilities.
ScienceLogic can enable that video management easily, said Steve Harriman, senior vice president of marketing.
"We see this as being a ripe and rapidly growing niche market where there is a void of holistic management tools for all the different equipment providers and endpoints," Harriman said.
[Related: Where's The Puck Going In Enterprise Videoconferencing? ]
ScienceLogic customers with up-to-date versions of the company's flagship EM7 monitoring and management platform can add the video management capability as a software download at no additional cost. Service providers can create their own branded portals for video managed services using ScienceLogic as the underlying platform.
ScienceLogic prices service management at $150 per device, and the platform itself is available as a perpetual or subscription-based license.
Erik Rudin, senior director of product management, said the ScienceLogic platform can provide alerts on availability and performance conditions while monitoring video operations in tandem with a customer's IT infrastructure.
What's important, he said, is to be able to cover a number of different video products within an even broader base of multivendor infrastructure deployments, removing the need to use point products to manage each piece.
"It's a multivendor world, not just a Cisco world, or a Dell world, or an EMC world," he said. "Video is introducing a layer of complexity that realtime communications hasn't see in some time. If you think about VNOC services and supporting both layered infrastructure and gateway services, you've got to look at the entire stack. So that's quite an advantage for us against a point product that looks at just video or collaboration applications."
Founded in 2003, ScienceLogic has seen a 64 percent compound annual growth rate, according to Harriman. It added headcount following a $15 million Series A investment from New Enterprise Associates (NEA) in April 2010 and now has nearly 100 employees.
About 25 percent of ScienceLogic business is federal government customers, according to Harriman. More than half of its business comes from service providers who sell services to a range of customers, from SMB to midmarket and large enterprise users.
Ira Weinstein, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research, said the ScienceLogic platform would appeal to IT managers seeking single-portal management of video with other IT assets and to service providers wanting a centralized, multitenant architecture for delivering managed services.
"As the importance of videoconferencing in the enterprise has grown, so has the need for tools to monitor and manage the video environment," Weinstein said in a statement.
VAR500 solution provider ePlus, based in Herndon, Va., uses ScienceLogic as a managed service delivery platform and has recently expanded its video and managed services footprints via acquisition of fellow solution providers.
The video add-on makes it easy for ePlus to provide more management and services capabilities from a single source, said Kevin Detsch, ePlus' vice president of business development.
"This will further enhance our ability to be a 'one-stop-shop' for customers to deliver cost-effective collaboration architecture support of complex, dynamic and highly integrated solutions across multiple manufacturers," Detsch said.
The ability to get granular with video managed services makes them a value-add, added ScienceLogic's Rudin.
"I know what was installed, what the quality of the last call was, who did they talk to, how did it go, all of the detailed data they need to understand the activity but also troubleshoot," he said. "We can provide rich historical quality data, so when someone says, 'I just had a very terrible video call,' we can do proactive notification."