I spent the past two days in Nashville at the Autotask user conference. There was a panel session this morning featuring reps from most of the leading remote monitoring and management solution companies, including Kaseya, n-Able, Dell (fka Silverback), ITControl Suite, and Level Platforms. These folks owe their existence, for the most part, to the difficulty of maintaining servers and desktops. I asked these folks a question from the floor, which was something like this:
How long will it be before microbusinesses – companies with fewer than 50 seats – don’t need remote monitoring and management tools anymore because they do everything in the cloud and the only ones doing the monitoring will be huge companies like Google, Microsoft, and so on?
I got three types of answers:
- Don’t worry, your clients are still going to need you as a trusted advisor. (That is reassuring, but it’s not what I asked. I know my clients are still going to need my services. My question is how long will they still need your services.)
- Don’t worry, your clients are still going to be using computers that have to be monitored and managed until something really radical happens – something based entirely on thin clients and a return to the mainframe paradigm. (That wasn’t my question, that was my premise. When is that going to be?)
- We’re not worried because our products will help you monitor and manage cloud resources, too.
That third one didn’t answer my question, either, but I thought it was an excellent point. When you move services to the cloud, you sort of take it on faith that your provider is doing what they said they would do. Even companies that rely on hosted mail, files, databases, intranets, and so on will probably need some third-party company to watch the services’ performance and alert the customer about problems. Some of the companies represented on stage already have this sort of monitoring deployed or on their road maps. I wonder if there were any guys up there thinking “uh oh …..”
2 Comments
David,
Great question. The challenge for these vendors is whether or not they can adapt to a shifting market, but the competition once they get there. These vendors are designed for service providers to manage multiple customer environments. When a cloud vendor sets up monitoring and management for a large, virtualized data center or computing grid, the demands are greater. Not only is there a difference in scale, but complexity. Once these vendors step into that market, they are up against some big players (HP, IBM, etc. ) , and large open source solutions (Nagios, Cacti, etc) that are already entrenched in corporate data centers.
David,
I remember your questions sitting on the panel. This is truly a difficult one and some may say that some of the answer s are cliche and don’t really showcase the forward planning on this transition.
Truthfully, IT has increased in complexity and management of this complexity will remain for at least another 10 years. I can say that Kaseya has their ear to the ground and even though remote monitoring is an important part of what we do, there are plans to expand far beyond so that we can assist our customers for many more years to come.
Thanks for the post and I wish you the best,
Chad Gniffke
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Kaseya