Procuro Offers New Twist On Buddy System

Imagine a network management service that worked the same way,a tool that enabled bidirectional communication between digital resources, allowing administrators to view every device on a network as buddies and monitor performance as they would monitor a Buddy List. Thanks to Procuro, a relatively new ISV in San Diego, the service exists already, and is available for solution providers to incorporate into their managed service offerings.

Dubbed the Procuro Enterprise Management Service (EMS), the solution combines the functionality of instant messaging with the performance of a framework-level management suite. It keeps tabs on every network function and can be customized through an Internet portal to monitor a variety of metrics only tangentially related to the network.

"Anything that is manageable, [Procuro] can manage," said Steve Vames, director of professional services at Manchester Technologies, Hauppauge, N.Y. "Now we can ask customers what their pain points are and help them in areas we never helped them before."

The Procuro EMS is the brainchild of Vince Gordon, Procuro's CEO and founder, and his partner, Bernard Lee. The service, essentially a combination of three proprietary products, runs on a server back at Procuro headquarters. When a customer signs up, agents that the customer installs on his network capture data, encrypt it, compress it and push it back to Procuro.

Next, with the help of the Personal Information Management Monitor (PIMM), customers can access that information remotely, calling on up-to-the-minute information about what is happening on their networks and where it is occurring. As Gordon explained, the PIMM product is based on the premise of presence management,the same premise behind popular services such as AOL Instant Messenger.

To use it, network managers double-click an icon on a PDA or desktop task tray to open an applet that displays every connected device with colors that indicate status. This applet presents a customer's entire network in the drill-down layout of an instant messaging window, giving customers a bird's-eye view of realtime network performance overall.

"If human resources can use instant messaging technology to detect each other's presence, why can't digital resources?" Gordon asked, noting that the name of his company means "to manage" in Latin. "Our service dynamically keeps track of everything."

Today, Procuro channel partners sell the product under their own brands, marketing the Procuro EMS as subscription-based services of their own.

Sensatronics, an environmental sensor company in Bow, N.H., peddles the service on a per-license basis to frozen-storage companies that use it to manage temperatures in their warehouses, as well as to heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) contractors that use it to monitor the environments at other customer locations.

"[Procuro EMS] is both a management and a quality assurance tool," said Bob Chiras, Sensatronics' vice president of sales and marketing. "Big products are good, but none of them give customers the value-add that we can offer them with Procuro."

Chiras added that the solution costs his customers up to 75 percent less than what they used to pay for larger solutions, such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and Unicenter from Computer Associates International.