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By Michael Eggebrecht
Weeks after its acquisition by CA, Nimsoft has launched a software-as-a-service version of its IT infrastructure monitoring system, giving customers visibility into their internal assets and cloud-based resources without the need for on-premise software.
The new service, dubbed Nimsoft On Demand, “wraps up and delivers a complete, full-function monitoring solution in a SaaS model,” explained Nimsoft founder and general manager Gary Read in an interview. Like its on-premise counterpart, Nimsoft On Demand can monitor applications running in an organization’s internal data center, as well as SaaS and cloud offerings from the likes of Salesforce, Google, Rackspace and Amazon -- a capability introduced to the monitoring software in October.
While it takes the on-premise version hours or days to start-up and deploy, SaaS customers can be up and running in under an hour, said Read. The service detects components of a user’s environment, and automatically populates dashboards and reports, as well as error-handling and notification situations.
Both versions of the monitoring software use a subscription model based on the number of devices being monitored. Customers of the on-demand service pay an additional charge covering costs such as hosting, but Read noted that Nimsoft priced the offering so that the total cost of ownership was “significantly lower” than the on-premise solution.
Redwood City, Calif.-based Nimsoft, which had $50 million in bookings last year, counts both midmarket companies and managed service providers among its 800 customers. The new service has been in beta-testing with several such clients, including the National Pain Institute and SyCom Technologies, over the last few months.
In a statement, Renee Symons, VP of services operations at SyCom, a Richmond, Va.-based IT service provider, said that she expects the on-demand platform to “lower our total cost of service delivery and provide a foundation upon which we can build higher-value/higher-margin offerings.”
For the SaaS offering, Nimsoft opted to use a SAS 70 certified data center, according to Read, “to ensure that customers were not concerned about security and availability of the infrastructure of their environment. … It’s fully PCI-compliant with really high carrier-grade security and availability with high redundancy.”
Read said that he expects to see existing Nimsoft clients switch to the SaaS model, thanks to the lower costs and the ability for it to reduce administration work. “They get to spend their time on running their business,” he noted.
More and more companies are turning to cloud-based resources, said Read, describing a large customer that recently scrapped plans to procure and provision 3,000 new servers for testing and development in favor of using the cloud to deliver the compute power.
For Nimsoft -- and its new owner, CA -- that represents an opportunity to enable “CIOs to monitor the performance of their cloud-based resources, to be able to benchmark that performance against internal resources, to be able to benchmark the performance of one cloud provider against another cloud provider, so they can understand which providers are offering them the best service at the right price.”
The $350 million acquisition of Nimsoft by CA was completed March 17, and under the agreement Nimsoft now operates as a stand-alone unit within CA’s cloud business line. For CA, said Read, the reason for the deal was to extend its reach into service providers and midmarket businesses -- “where their traditional solutions and salesforce do not particularly play.”
Nimsoft, taking advantage of the resources of its parent, expects to reach into other disciplines, he said. In the coming weeks, the unit will officially launch a service that lets clients monitor the availability and cost of energy in their data centers.
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