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‘Tiny Metal Box’ Woos VARs and MSPs

Looking to bring appliance-enabled software services to smaller companies, Jumpnode Systems has created a reseller program and also began signing MSPs to use its appliance for monitoring and remote management. The three-year-old Minneapolis-based company, which only began shipping the appliance two years ago, launched the partner program at the end of April and has already […]

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Jessica Davis

Jun 11, 2007

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Looking to bring appliance-enabled software services to smaller companies, Jumpnode Systems has created a reseller program and also began signing MSPs to use its appliance for monitoring and remote management.

The three-year-old Minneapolis-based company, which only began shipping the appliance two years ago, launched the partner program at the end of April and has already wooed a handful of MSPs and VARs.

To win them over, Jumpnode is offering discounts on purchases and annual subscription renewals, co-op marketing funds, partner training, professional sales tools, Level 2 customer support and optionally a custom-branded product.

The two-tier program classifies partners as authorized and certified. Certified resellers also are eligible to receive leads from the Web that are generated by Jumpnode.

The company is looking for the partner program to take its technology into more small businesses.

“Small companies have the same challenges as large companies do,” said Irfan Khan, CEO and product strategist at Jumpnode. “I wondered why they weren’t implementing the solutions that were out there.”

One of the things Khan noticed during his time earlier in his career as a network engineer was that sales people were resistant to lugging servers around to customer sites, and customers often didn’t have a place to put servers.

With that in mind, Khan created an appliance with a form factor designed for the market. It’s a small metal box, the size of a paperback book at 7 inches by 5 inches by 1 U high. It has no fans or hard drives and it runs on an ARM-embedded processor rather than a hot x86 processor. The appliance includes an analog modem, an optional cellular modem and an Ethernet port.

The appliance monitors information such as disk space and event logs on Windows servers and on the network side it can monitor bit rates and bandwidth. It monitors CPU utilization on routers and it can also monitor Web pages.

In addition, Khan said many of Jumpnode’s customers use the device to monitor information such as temperatures on factory floors or alarm status.

“Through our reporting tool, graphs can be sent to floor managers,” he said.

MSPs drop-ship the appliance to customer sites, allowing them to perform basic monitoring plus more advanced services such as monitoring SAAS (software as a service) applications.

Beyond its MSP customers, Jumpnode also is offering its appliance to larger enterprises through VARs. One such end customer is the Powerball lottery, which uses the appliances to monitor all its sites and services, Khan said.

And Jumpnode has recently embarked on a new kind of partnership as well – selling the appliance to other companies so they can brand and sell it as their own. Belkin, known for its iPod accessories, will be shipping a product nearly identical to the Jumpnode device in the next few weeks.

The Belkin-branded product is identical to the one available from Jumpnode, except it features KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) integration. Khan expects the two products to continue to diverge as the partnership continues.

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‘Tiny Metal Box’ Woos VARs and MSPs

Jessica Davis

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