Unified monitoring vendor Nimsoft has expanded its
channel partner program to formally include two new types of partners beyond
its standard managed service provider partners.
Nimsoft’s announcement today follows the company’s news from last month that it
has created monitoring integrations with four major players in the managed
services and SAAS space—Google Apps for Business, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web
Services (AWS) and EC2, and Salesforce.com.
Nimsoft is extending its partner program beyond its Service Provider Partners,
which deliver managed services, hosted and cloud-based services to two new
partner types—Solution Partners and Technology Development Partners.
The goals are to deliver more complete solutions to end customers and to
continue to grow the ecosystem around Nimsoft, says Ken Rutsky, director of
Unified Monitoring Programs at Nimsoft.
“We have feet in the data center as well as the outsourced environment,” says
Rutsky. “You have to have a partner to do that.”
Solution Partners are ISVs and SAAS providers that extend Nimsoft’s solution
with complementary IT service management solutions, the company says. Those
include net-flow traffic capture, service desk and IT infrastructure library
management databases. Charter members include Acentix, Attention Soft,
AutoTask, BigFix, ConnectWise, geoXMF, Plixer, Sanfir, Service-Now,
Sensatronics, Shavlik, Stratavia, VaultLogix and Wendia.
Technology Development Partners are those who build data collection probes to
extend the types of objects NMS monitors from nonstandard databases to ERP
applications to geo-based location services, according to Nimsoft. Partners of
this type pay a fee to Nimsoft and then resell their solutions to end
customers. Charter members in this partner group include InTeliNet and Agentil.
Nimsoft’s Service Provider Partners include CDW, FusionStorm, Ingram Micro’s
Seismic Division and Rackspace Hosting, among others.
The move comes at a time when more businesses are seriously looking at the
benefits of managed services and software as a service (SAAS) as a way to
reduce capital costs and transition IT expenses into operational costs.
“A lot of change is going on,” Nimsoft CEO Gary Read tells Channel Insider. “Recession forces end users to look
at how they can drive cost out of their computing environments. I think we will
start to see more and more business flowing through service providers.”
Read says that in the years to come customers are likely to rely on internal
resources combined with services provided by external providers.
“Customers will need to be able to monitor and manage that, irrespective of
who’s providing them,” says Read.
To support the Technology Development partners, Nimsoft has created a set of
APIs and an SDK.
The company is offering a partner portal and is making support services
available to its new partners.