CA Technologies (CA) is adding a freemium component to its Nimsoft platform with CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap – a free version of the original product that is intended to disrupt the IT management market.  Here are the details.

The release is aimed squarely at organizations that have assembled a piecemeal solution for IT management with non-integrated point tools and free open source solutions, Bill Talbot, senior director, product marketing, told MSPmentor.

“This serves the needs of an underserved population that has had to compromise on what they are using,” Talbot told me. “For us, we want to get awareness and greater adoption of our flagship it monitoring and management solution. We hope users will upgrade over time. “

Freemium strategies are not new among IT management vendors and managed services platform providers over the years with offerings from companies such as N-able, ManageEngine, SolarWinds, LogMeIn.

CA says its Nimsoft Snap offering is free forever; it is not a limited trial. However, organizations are limited to monitoring 30 devices for free. They can include physical and virtual servers, applications, databases, storage and network devices.

CA said that the tool can be up and running within an hour and does not require much set up and configuration.

The platform provides the following features:

CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap is available for free download starting today, and it runs on Microsoft Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows Server 2012. It requires 2 GB of available memory and 15 GB free disk space.

(The premium version also runs on Linux and Unix platforms.)

The premium product, Nimosoft Monitor 7.0, also got updates today including improvements in autodiscovery, topology performance, and message bus scalability. In addition, CA said that it continues to add monitoring capabilities and has added Hitachi storage devices to the list of monitored devices supported.

“We think the service provider community will get excited about this to download for internal use. It will help them understand why we have been successful, and it gives them the chance to try Nimsoft,” Talbot said.

The other benefit? “If they have prospects that are on the fence, we have a try before you buy option now.”