Klir Steps Up Managed Services Campaign

Seattle-based Klir, which tapped Access Distribution in the spring to reach potential channel partners, seeks to place itself amid the growing number of vendors that have developed managed services platforms.

The platforms let solution providers remotely monitor or manage their customers' computing environments with an eye toward guaranteeing predictable IT systems performance and preventing downtime. Providers take over some or all of their customers' IT environments and charge them utility-like fees for the service.

Klir on July 10 released Klir Analytics 2.1, which the vendor says features faster configuration, improved traffic monitoring and customization capabilities that allow Klir to stand out from the crowd. Deployment of the tool takes place over the Web.

"Resellers no longer even need to go to the customer site for installation," said Klir CEO James Maiocco.

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The vendor is making the tool available to solution providers through a SAAS (software as a service) model, which removes the need to make a large upfront capital investment in the technology and places the burden of performing technology updates on the vendor, said Maiocco. In this way, he added, the company delivers more value to its solution provider partners.

The new release of Klir Analytics gives IT professionals the ability to automatically add devices, interfaces and tunnels during auto-discovery. Previously, a solution provider would have had to guide someone at the customer site over the phone to perform the process manually, said Maiocco.

"This way we're just speeding up the process," he said.

The release also includes self-service application traffic monitoring, an API for custom logins from any customer Web page, and features such as best practice dashboards, reports and alerts.

Klir is wrapping its strategy to recruit VARs and integrators around a partnership with Westminster, Colo.-based Access Distribution. The distributor is giving VARs and integrators the option of using the Klir platform to provide managed services to customers or instead leveraging Access Distribution's engineering staff to handle the services.

By tapping Access Distribution, Klir is taking a different approach from its managed services competitors, which have opted to launch recruiting campaigns to deal directly with channel partners. Because distributors do business to hundreds or thousands of resellers on an ongoing basis, vendors theoretically gain quicker access to large numbers of potential channel partners through them.

Maiocco said Klir has trained about 10 Access Distribution engineers on its technology in the past couple of months to prepare them to support the solution providers the vendor hopes to enlist in its managed services program.

The vendor and the distributor are in the process of signing up the first solution providers, he added.

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Solution providers that already do business with Klir have used the company's technology for assessments of their customers' computing environments.

"Our primary interest at this point is to use it as an entry point for new customers, and we do assessments for them," said Matthew Kayes, president of Seitel Leeds & Associates, in Seattle. "It's an effective way to introduce ourselves to the customers."

Seitel Leeds' expertise is to evaluate computing environments and show customers how to run them better. And while the company doesn't plan to get into managed services, Kayes said he believes solution providers can use Klir's technology effectively to that end.

That's the message Maiocco wants to take to the solution providers who are either considering managed services or already have jumped into it and may be looking for a change. He said he expects ease of use and the affordability of Klir's solution to appeal to providers already using other vendors' more expensive platforms.