Ingram Micro has launched a fully hosted Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) platform, now available to solution providers in Canada and the U.S. who want to offer their own managed services portfolios to customers.
To develop the platform, Ingram teamed up with Ottawa-based LPI Level Platforms Inc., which provides tools for solution providers to remotely monitor and manage small and mid-sized business customers from a Web-based central dashboard. The distributor also partnered with SAVVIS Inc., an IT utility services provider that delivers hosting, network and application services.
Managed services have been slowly changing the way we do business. Customers no longer want to call their service provider whenever they have a problem. Instead, they’re looking for proactive management of their technology to reduce downtime – and that’s why we’re seeing such interest in managed services. Essentially, it puts the responsibility on the backs of the MSPs (managed service providers).
Even Microsoft, at last week’s Convergence 2007 in San Diego, recognized the changing nature of the software industry by announcing future releases of on-demand “Live” products.
While managed services got off to a slow start and has had its share of failures, it’s starting to gain acceptance, thanks to personal on-demand services such as MySpace and YouTube. Like much technology adoption, it starts in the consumer space and eventually makes its way into business.
According to a recent survey by research firm ThinkStrategies, 62 per cent of respondents in large enterprises (with more than US$500 million in revenues) said they’re already using managed services, compared with 31 per cent of companies with revenues less than US$50 million. So while many people assume managed services are geared toward SMBs, quite a few large enterprises are already using this business model.
The challenge, however, is to ensure reliability and security. And this is where Ingram sees an opportunity in the market.
The distributor’s RMM platform is designed to give solution providers a utility-based platform for building out their own managed services portfolios. And anyone using the hosted solution will receive all necessary operating system upgrades, patches and refreshes, as well as the hardware and bandwidth to run the application.
While there are a lot of MSPs out there, Ingram says it’s getting into the business to provide a platform that doesn’t require an upfront investment in systems and hardware. Ultimately, the goal is to help solution providers develop a profitable offering with a predictable revenue stream, and eventually evolving their business models.
Ingram partnered with LPI for its Managed Workplace MSP platform, which is now the basis of Ingram’s Seismic Platform and Virtual Services Warehouse. SAVVIS worked with Ingram to build the hosted infrastructure, which is designed to reduce services supply chain costs and minimize the barriers to entry into managed services.
Ingram plans to partner with other vendors over the coming years to offer other hosted services such as e-mail management, anti-virus and spam filtering, as well as remote storage backup and recovery.
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