Managed Services Platform Vendors Ready To Fortify MSPs With New Tools

Managed services platform vendors have been busy in 2011. A slew of companies have launched a multitude of new upgrades and tools for 2011, a list that includes Nimsoft, N-able Technologies, Kaseya and Level Platforms.

Overall, the new and upgraded tools should allow service providers to get closer to their customers and take on more IT responsibilities on behalf of those companies, executives said. Here's a look at some of the new functionality that service providers can expect:

Nimsoft

Nimsoft, a CA Technologies company, has launched a user platform, Nimsoft Unified Manager, for its brand new Nimsoft Service Desk product and its existing monitoring solution, newly renamed as Nimsoft Monitor.

It's a significant product overhaul for the Campbell, Calif.-based company that was acquired by CA in March 2010

Nimsoft Unified Manager provides an intuitive and bi-directional integration between monitoring and service management and is available either on-demand (SaaS) or as an on-premise solution, said Chris O'Connell, director of product marketing for Nimsoft.

The integration between monitoring and service management should improve the productivity of IT operations -- helping to ensure that problems and potential problems are quickly and accurately addressed based on their impact to the business, he said.

"We see a trend of customers wanting to consolidate and get rid of high-cost silo solutions. This [Unified Manager] is for database, service desk, configuration management. We wanted to consolidate to a common look and feel, be more agile, cut costs and give customers a better TCO," O'Connell said.

Nimsoft is confident that existing MSPs using Nimsoft Monitor will want to add the new Nimsoft Service Desk solution as well.

"For service providers to be successful, they have to be as close as possible to customers. By offering Service Desk as an integral part of that offering, they have 24x7 log-in of all issues and problems, with all transparency to deliver a certain service level for their customers," O'Connell said. "We are coming out of the gate really going hard at this, allowing customers to adopt [Service Desk] for less than $100 a month for a fixed license. We will be aggressive to help our customers help their customers."

Leveraging Unified Manager as a common user experience across both Nimsoft Service Desk and Nimsoft Monitor should help recruit more service providers to both products, O'Connell said.

"It's a common architecture, same configuration management database, same portlets and APIs," he said. "The customer is going to be able to adopt one product and quickly learn the other."

Customers can also mix and match on-premise and SaaS-based choices to whatever best fits their business model, O'Connell said.

"Pay-as-you-go is a big deal with service providers. They want our product to be an integral part of their service, something they can white label and have consistent costs to charge their customer in a consumable model. If only one customer uses five Service Desk seats, that's all you pay for and if you adopt another customer, the charge [per seat] is the same," he said.

Nimsoft Service Desk is built on technology that Nimsoft acquired from InteQ, an IT service management company that it acquired last December. InteQ's technology leverages IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines, cloud and Web 2.0 technologies to develop a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) service management solution that reduces the total cost of ownership, offers fast time to production and easy adoption, according to Nimsoft.

Next: Level Platforms Launches Device Manager

Nimsoft plans a comprehensive education and marketing program for Unified Manager and Service Desk to help service providers ramp up on the company's new solutions, O'Connell said.

"We found with Service Desk, it's very much a hands-on type of business. We will launch all kinds of service capabilities and training for customers. As part of the release, we'll also have support from Ingram Micro as part of their Seismic offering. They're helping with the launch as well."

Level Platforms

Level Platforms’ Managed Workplace 2011 includes new automation and agent Device Manager functionality, according to CEO Peter Sandiford. Device Manager is a radical change from the company’s agentless model history. While Level Platforms still employs a no-agent policy as its primary technology, MSPs that have customers with devices that need agent management can now do so, he said.

"Even though you love agentless, the fact is it doesn’t fit everywhere. There are large classes of important technology that don’t work in that environment. Anything that’s not connected to the network: laptops, kiosks, DMZs. We said, ’Let’s put an agent that’s optional and as soon as we deploy this Device Manager, it syncs up as if it is on the network,’ " Sandiford said.

Many MSPs might look to employ a hybrid model with agent-based and agentless monitoring and management, depending on the customer, he said.

The other big addition is automated asset scanning, which automatically looks for new devices without waiting for a scheduled scan. Software assets also are subdivided into applications, Windows services and hot fixes, which simplifies organization of that information, said Sandiford.

"We didn’t focus on that, and we needed to catch up. We think this leapfrogs us past the competition," he said. "It really allows the MSP to automate everything to do in their business with lots of management around it."

Level Platforms also has a new service called Automation On Demand in which the company can create any script within 48 hours of a request, said Sandiford.

"We’ve created a very easy-to-use product," he added. "Managed Workplace 2011 fills the two gaps we had in the product." Andy Harper, owner of Gaeltek, a Manassas Park, Va.-based MSP and a member of CRN’s Most Innovative MSP list, has piloted Managed Workplace 2011 and said it’s significantly faster than the old version.

"It was painful to go back to the old service center," Harper said. "The asset scanning is more robust now. As soon as a device is found on the network it is scanned almost immediately. Before it was a four-hour window. And the depth of the information about the device is phenomenal. I can see down to the memory configuration. Everything I want and more."

Kaseya

Kaseya added new security, business continuity and discovery features to its K2 managed services platform.

"When we launched K2, part of that promise was to provide solutions you need to do day-to-day operations. You need the depth and breadth of functionality to deal with day-to-day pain points like patching, auditing," said Gerald Beaulieu, director of product marketing for Kaseya.

The new platform also includes more extensibility, allowing third-party developers to plug their customized monitoring, reporting and security solutions into Kaseya. That last feature is the first step in Kaseya building its own apps marketplace, said Beaulieu.

Next: N-able's 7.2 N-Central platform includes better integration

"That’s definitely our intent. Some [apps] we will want to sell internally. In another case you may download and go pay that third party. … We’re not there yet. At this point, we’re marketing the solutions and making sure [MSPs] know the various options available," Beaulieu added. "The beauty is when you plug into our architecture, you gain the same user interface and their product does whatever it does."

In that vein, Kaseya now offers Kaseya Antivirus powered by Kaspersky Lab, and Kaseya Antimalware powered by Malwarebytes. Kaseya previously offered antivirus security only from AVG.

"Our customers wanted more flexibility and more options in security. We may look at other [third-party vendors] down the road," Beaulieu said. "With the antimalware, Malwarebytes is used by many customers today in stand-alone fashion. But they’ve wrapped their corporate edition, not the free one, into our edition. It’s clear that one antivirus on a machine is not enough to ensure the end points are secure from any kind of attack. The unified K2 platform has reporting similar throughout the system. It gives us the look of one product."

In business continuity, Kaseya Backup 4.0 is powered by Acronis 10.0 and has improved reliability and performance, according to Beaulieu. In addition, Kaseya now offers online backup through a new partnership utilizing Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and it has a new backup solution specific to applications such as SQL, Exchange or SharePoint using AppAssure replay.

"It’s a multipronged approach for dealing with backup across the network," Beaulieu said. "You might want to back up an entire image of a workstation or server, or use online backup with standard file and folder backup. You can pick or choose."

Finally, Kaseya’s discovery now employs a multiscan solution with a richer visual experience, according to the company.

"We have historically had a solution that does a ping-only type of scan. It wouldn’t discover everything on a network and was not a more visual solution. It found something, but what is the device? We’ve started a multiscan solution that has ping-based scan, port-based scan, a whole slew of mechanisms to find what’s on a network," Beaulieu said. "Is it a Windows device, a Linux device or printer? It’s easier to find anything on the network and ultimately deploy on the network."

N-able Technologies

N-able rolled out Version 7.2 of its N-central platform, which includes better integration with Autotask and ConnectWise, automatic patch approvals, redesigned remote control and more.

"We’ve made the migration plan very smooth. It provides bidirectional integration [with ConnectWise and Autotask] to allow engineers to flow information back and forth to other systems. That’s something customers have been looking forward to," said JP Jauvin, president and COO of N-able.

"Other improvements include a streamlined management process for patch approvals. It reduces the complexity of managing patches. And we’ve redesigned the plumbing to let remote control be faster. If the network supports peer-to-peer connection through UDP hole-punching, that makes things a lot faster," Jauvin said. "In the past, everything had to be funneled back through our N-central server. Now it can go directly to the device."

In addition, N-able enhanced software discovery on N-central 7.2 so that MSPs have better reporting capability on software license keys, Jauvin said. "They can help their customers in turn understand where they are with software license management," he said.