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Enterprise !== Managed Service Provider
Posted May 16th, 2007 by rybolov
Message to vendors: If you want to break into the Managed Service Provider market, there is one thing extra that you need to do.
Enterprise-class products are reasonably good at being able to support a 3-tier model. That way you can abstract out everything into whatever architectural model you want. Need more database oomph, add some more power at the database tier. Need to support a remote site, put a data collector out there on the management LAN and just send events back to the central collectors. This stuff is great.
But when it comes down to MSPs, there is one thing that we need above and beyond what enterprise-class products have. We need to be able to flag data as belonging to a certain customer. That way, once events have trickled up to the Single Pane of Glass (TM) that the NOC operators use, we still can tell which environment the event came from. That requires tagging and the simple ability to have multiple devices on one IP address when clients have address collisions (everybody using 10.0.0.0 comes to mind).
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2 Comments »
May 16th, 2007 at 11:20 am
it’s called netcool impact server
May 16th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
I haven’t looked at Netcool in a long time, but it probably does it.
However, that’s just one solution set among the many that I need. If you’re say, a Managed Security Service Provider, you need management and monitoring solutions for all the following:
IDS/IPS
Firewalls
A-V
Log Archival and Report Generation
Vulnerability Scanning
Anti-Spam
Web Content
Inside of each solution, there are products that are designed with MSPs in mind, and there are products that are designed just to be enterprise-class.