MSP Software: Dell SilverBack Out, Nimsoft In at American Integration
IT solutions provider American Integration has announced that it’s replacing its SilverBack monitoring tools with a Nimsoft On Demand SaaS deployment. The former is owned by Dell, and the latter by CA Technologies, which means this is a small-scale victory in a large-scale battle for MSPs and the IT channel. Here are some perspectives.
MSPmentor mentioned this development last week, but here’s a few more details.
Dell’s SilverBack platform has alienated MSPs by slowly transitioning from on-premises appliance to a cloud-delivered architecture at the same time Dell began extending a stronger hand in direct managed services sales. But since American Integration’s press release indicates that they’re using an at least partially on-premises SilverBack deployment, that doesn’t seem to enter the picture here.
Instead, that same press release indicates that American Integration went with Nimsoft On Demand for “powerful security features and advanced dashboards—which make it easy to drill down into detailed graphs and statistics for a deep understanding of the network, applications, servers and database performance.”
Replacing complicated legacy solutions with SaaS systems is nothing new — but this is just mounting evidence that Dell needs to more strongly communicate the value of Dell Managed Services to channel partners. Dell Channel Chief Greg Davis in May 2010 discussed how Dell continues to win new MSP channel partners even as some legacy Silverback partners shift to other platforms.
On the flip side, Nimsoft seems to be crowing about new MSP wins on a regular basis. Nimsoft originally was designed for on-premises deployments within MSP data centers. But Nimsoft a few months ago launched Nimsoft On Demand, a SaaS version of the company’s managed services software.
Sign up for MSPmentor’s weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. And follow us via RSS, Facebook, Identi.ca; and Twitter. Plus, check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com and our disclosures here.
