Pay As You Go With Paglo's Cloud Computing Platform

Company:

Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.

Technology Sector: Managed Services

Key Product: Paglo services platform

Year Founded: 2007

Number of Channel Partners: 175 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Paglo offers a crawler-based managed services reporting platform with a market-disrupting price of $1 per device per month.

The Lowdown: Paglo launched its managed services platform in the fourth quarter of 2008 with the goal of applying a search and analytics engine and capturing data at a price point that its competitors can't match.

The company's pricing, $1 per device per month for inventory, network and server management, is also based on a pay-as-you-use-it model, said Brian de Haaf, CEO of Paglo.

"There's an overall move toward cloud-based services. There are no server deployments. We've quickly developed applications, features and functionality aimed at IT consultants, resellers, MSPs," he said.

Paglo downloads a crawler into the client's environment, which gathers data and securely transports that data into Paglo's Tier 1 data center, de Haaf said.

"[Our competitors] take a fundamentally different philosophy. They build relational databases on the back-end and provide fairly standard reports. Paglo turns it on its head," de Haaf said. "You need to think about it as a search problem, collect all the data whether you think you need it or not. Then, you can rapidly build out applications and present data in a striking and compelling way.

Paglo's pricing model can be an attractive option for companies looking to cut costs, even if they're already on a monthly or quarterly billing management model, de Haaf said. "Maybe business is down a little and they're rethinking how they will use cloud-based services. We're also displacing existing [managed services] platforms."

This week, Paglo launched a new patch management application and a reporting application, as well as a custom branding option that allows MSPs to upload their logo and/or their customers' logo onto reports.

"Sophisticated clients want to be able to log in; now MSPs can custom brand the interface," he said. "The patch management application consolidates monitoring, alerting and reporting directly within Paglo. It integrates with Microsoft's [Windows Server Update Services], the mechanism that is used for pushing out patches for Windows software," de Haaf said. "Pricing is also disruptive because of our being more on-demand. You can try and buy Paglo in a more efficient manner without a lot of overhead costs that more traditional vendors have."

Raj Saxena, CEO of IP Island Consulting, a San Jose, Calif.-based MSP has been using Paglo since February after having used Kaseya for three years.

"It's cost effective. One dollar per device makes a big difference. I've run Kaseya, I've run N-able. It becomes a pricy solution. Going the SaaS route, I'm saving a lot of money now," he said. "With Kaseya, even if you want $1 pricing, you have to buy 1,000 licenses and with add-ons you spend a lot more. Paglo is pay as you go. You can't beat its scalable architecture and the product, with new applications, is getting better every day."