In The Media

A small businesses’ worst nightmare is probably unforeseen and seemingly unpreventable website downtime caused by an internal glitch. GoDaddy.comclients, who use the domain provider to host their websites, found themselves in the dark for an entire afternoon due to “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.” As an indispensable part of some SMB’s business processes, many faced downtime that caused loss in revenue and a halt in sales leads.

By Joseph Walker
MSPmentor mentioned earlier today that "Quest’s PacketTrapteam appears to be heads-down on a cloud version of PacketTrap MSP, a remote monitoring and management (RMM) software platform." We can confirm that PacketTrap is indeed headed toward a launch of an SaaS edition of PacketTrap MSP.

I spoke recently with Mike Byrne (pictured right), Director of MSP at Quest, and he said Quest has a non-firm Q4 target release date for their new SaaS PacketTrap MSP software—which combines the company remote monitoring and management (RMM) software and their professional service automation (PSA) product. For anyone not familiar with PacketTrap MSP, I suggest you take a look at it here. It's a great network monitoring and management product at a reasonable price.

By Joe Panettieri
While parent Quest Software considers its future ownership options, business unit PacketTrapcontinues to gain momentum in the managed services software market. Plus, PacketTrap is preparing a complete, cloud-based, end-to-end managed services platform, according to Mike Byrne, director of MSP at Quest Software.

For those of us that don’t think the world will end in December 2012, this month will bring about a time for Managed Service Providers to do some strategic planning, identifying business goals and outlining ways to accomplish company-wide  initiatives. Technology seems to be evolving at an accelerated pace, bringing about both challenges and opportunities for MSPs. Since increasing revenue is likely a business goal for most companies, it’s important to think about ways to leverage IT environment changes in order to offer new services. To do so, let’s first evaluate two trends likely to impact every managed service provider.

By Chris Talbot
Many MSPs have grown accustomed to managing customers' physical IT assets in a single location using remote monitoring and management tools. But here comes the cloud, complicating the process with virtual machines in multiple locations hosted by multiple entities. How will MSPs cope?