Europe’s CentraStage Makes Managed Services Moves
The crowded market for remote monitoring and management (RMM) software apparently has yet another contender: CentraStage of the United Kingdom is hoping to carve a bigger niche for itself, promoting SaaS-centric administration tools to MSPs. Here are some quick details.
According to Managing Director Christian Nagele, CentraStage has been quietly developing a SaaS RMM proposition over the last couple of years, focusing initially on the United Kingdom market. More recently, CentraStage has been positioning itself as an alternative for MSPs that are evaluating Kaseya’s new K2 platform.
Asserts Nagele: “…with Kaseya moving to K2, with the inevitable bumps along the way (engineering multi-tenancy into what is a very feature-rich product can’t have been easy…), we are seeing an increasing number of MSPs looking for alternatives. We believe CentraStage is a viable option for IT support businesses and in fact are seeing increasing numbers of MSPs in the UK moving to CentraStage from Kaseya.”
But therein lies the rub: How many MSPs are actually embracing CentraStage? And are numerous MSPs really defecting from Kaseya — at a time when Kaseya says it’s generating record revenues and customer adoption? I concede: I need to do more digging on both points, especially with regard to Kaseya’s SaaS pricing and the implications for MSPs.
Meanwhile, the highly fragmented managed services software market extends far beyond Kaseya. CentraStage will also need to compete against entrenched players like Level Platforms, CA Inc.’s Nimsoft, N-able and Zenith Infotech; pure SaaS players like Citrix GoToManage (formerly Paglo) and GFI Max; and growing players like LabTech Software, Quest Software’s PacketTrap and New Zealand’s Navarisk. (If I forgot a name don’t flame me; post a comment instead).
Keep It Simple
In an email exchange, Nagele concedes that CentraStage isn’t trying to be all things to all people.
Noted Nagele:
“We lack some of the high-end features common in tools like Kaseya, such as integrated online backup and AV – but we aim to provide the core functionality that MSPs require, and we aim to provide it at a far lower cost than some of our competitors. We also introduce new features every 3 months, all driven by our customers, so the delivery of new functionality is rapid.”
Translation: It sounds like a classic SaaS strategy to me. In the days ahead, I hope to connect with Nagele on the phone to explore CentraStage’s current installed base and growth strategy for 2010.
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Joe,
How about a mention for UBiqube Solution, a french based provider of a converged service delivery platform for network, security, and VOIP services. our MSActivator, platform combines provisioning, asset management, SIEM, and RMM in one solution. Including RBAC, multi-tenancy and remote customer portals. This is exactly the kinda of solution that Partners need to streamline their back office and delivery cost effective service bundles to mee growing SMB demand for managed services. The unique approach here is that the solution also provides supports Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, etc, and monitors any SNMP device. We are actively enabling managed services provider globally with a tool to help build and deliver a full suite of managed services.
Please feel free to contact me for more information.
Regards
Laton Palmer
VP Sales, America
UBiqube Solution
Laton: Please make sure UBiqube adds me to their media list.
Email: joe [at] NineLivesMediaInc [dot] com. Thanks.
-jp
I have been using CentraStage since the beginning, and I can truly say that the company I work for would not be able to keep to our stringent KPI’s and meeting SLA deadlines (some of which are under 30 mins at different sites across London) if we didn’t have CentraStage.
I have also been a active Member of the CentraStage community via their forums, the quick, prompt and informative reply’s of the users, of which the majority don’t work for CentraStage, shows how much they value the product and the sense of community is brilliant.
New feature requests are welcomed with open arm, and half the time, the developers reply letting us know they had already thought up that idea and it will be available in the next release.
I cant boast enough about this product, it has made my life so much easier, as its web based I can control any of my clients machines from any machine on the internet.
Dan
Dan: What type of company are you? End-customer? MSP? How many users? Please fill in the blanks if/when you have time. I’d welcome the opportunity to learn more, as would MSPmentor’s readers.
-jp
Hi JP,
I work for a company that provides a managed service to schools in London under the BSF programme. We currently have 9 out of the 17 schools on board (the rest will follow once building work has finished).
We are looking around the 3,300 mark for devices currently with CentraStage installed. This is across 10 sites with one central management console (in the cloud).. you can’t get much better.
The other brilliant feature of CentraStage is that if a machine doesn’t have it installed (for some reason) or a user decides to bring in their personal laptop to use for the day, we can send the user a very small .exe file that will install a cut down version of CentraStage so that we can remote access that machine, as soon as we disconnect the agent is automatically uninstalled and all traces deleted.
This also benefits us because if a user is working from home and they have an issue, they can still call our support desk and we can provide remote support instead of having to send the engineers all over the place to visit people’s homes.
The privacy feature is also used a lot in our environment, this feature is installed on all Teachers amp; School Admin machines so that they cannot be accessed without the users permission (i.e. having to click the “Yes allow Fred Smith to remotely take over your machine” which gives the users a sense of security and also means that our Engineers cannot just connect to their machines in case of confidential data etc… We do not enable this for Students machines as we sometimes need to connect quickly to resolve an issue and trying to get a student to allow you onto their machine can be hassle, so the flexibility of the product is brilliant.
We also have the client installed on all of our servers, this gives us great control over things like monitoring, we can set an automated alert in case of things like disk space being over a preset % so they we can address the issue before it impacts our users, the same can be done for things like core services, and the status of the device, so if the server goes down due to a power cut for instance, we will know instantly via an email to our support desk.
JP if you’re interested, maybe we could set up an online meeting so you can see exactly how this product benefits us and how we make full use of it in our environment?
My 2 cents on CentraStage: We’re a 3 technician hybrid break/fix + contract IT firm in the U.S. We tested Kaseya, Labtech, N-Able, Level, GFI, Zenith, ManageEngine, Dell (Silverback aka ProManage RIM and Everdream aka Distributed Device Management), MaaS 360, and LanDesk. And probably a couple others that I don’t remember…
Our biggest challenge was finding a RMM platform with a low initial investment to complement (not replace!) our existing business model. We picked CentraStage because they can do everything we need at a fraction of the price. Their interface is slick and extremely easy to learn and navigate.
What has us really excited about CentraStage is their energy and passion. I’ve never seen a group of developers, SaaS or otherwise, so devoted to improving their product.
It’s a shame that so little attention has been given to CentraStage. I guess every industry needs its underdog.