As managed services moves mainstream and adoption begins to soar, the need for technology and business collaboration among IT manufacturers and software developers becomes critical to the mix. Gone are the days when a service provider could simply offer a point solution that monitored and managed a single piece of the infrastructure. Today’s customers are becoming much savvier with regards to their IT management needs and related business benefits. They want a service provider that can effectively and affordably manage their business and technology requirements from end to end, 24/7. They want IT-as-a-Service.
To make IT-as-a-Service a reality for our partners N-able has established strategic technology and marketing alliances with Intel (vPro), Microsoft (System Center Essentials) and Iron Mountain Digital. News on our most recent alliance with Microsoft can be found at http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=23044 and http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/News/Nable-Microsoft-Enter-Interoperability-Agreement/
The key to IT-as-a-Service is having the ability to offer “wide” management capabilities across multiple environments/systems while also being able to go “deep” on trouble environments/systems to ensure prompt remediation. This is where collaboration between manufacturers and software developers is key.
When it comes to collaboration, we see two areas of focus: Business and Technology.
Business Collaboration -- the alignment of like business goals and go-to-market strategies. Our goal is to ensure that our partners benefit from the collaboration, and that it can quickly translate it into new business opportunities.
Technical Collaboration -- the technology interoperability and integration roadmap as defined by our existing and future joint partners. This is typically accomplished in a phased approach and is entirely driven by the partners.
The list of collaboration partners that N-able will engage with will continue to grow, but one thing is for certain, these partnerships will accelerate our partners’ growth and enable them to provide IT-as-a-Service. Two great examples of partners that are setting the standard for delivering IT-as-a-Service are N-able partners’ masterIT (www.master-it.com) and RIATA Technologies (www.riata-tech.com). Both have taken managed services, customer care and business profitability to new levels of excellence.
For a much closer look at the technical aspect of our alliance with Microsoft, check out this Microsoft blog with N-able’s VP of Research and Development August Wehrmann:
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/gzierdt/