In The Media

Rumor has it Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) could be acquired by a private equity firm — with Microsoft kicking in some money along the way. What does that mean for MSPs running Dell’s PacketTrap PSA or RMM software? Neither Dell nor PacketTrap will speculate publicly. But I will. Here’s MSPmentor’s spin on the situation — along with details about the new PacketTrap RMM 6.7 release, which adds support for Dell Device Monitoring, Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

7. Cisco Fires Back: Juniper Networks earlier this week suggested Cisco Systems will have a difficult time transitioning to Software-Defined Networks (SDN). What was Cisco’s reply? We’ve got it. Details soon on The VAR Guy.

I caught up with Jason Samples from PacketTrap at the ConnectWise IT Nation conference in Orlando.

While hanging out in the PacketTrap booth (IT Nation 2012), the talk turned to an interesting product combination that surprised me. Geoff Parker from PacketTrap tells me that a number of partners came by the booth and mentioned that they use these tools together.

Michael Dell is a man on a mission, striving to transform Dell for the new age of converged data centers, cloud computing and mobility. And yes, he is placing a huge bet on Windows 8. During an exclusive interview with The VAR Guy, Dell outlined the path forward for his company – and the opportunities ahead for PartnerDirect channel partners. Yes, Dell has an $8 billion services business. But that’s just 1 percent of the IT services market, Dell asserts, leaving plenty of opportunity for partners to cash in. Here’s how.

Natan Ovadia, a partner management specialist at Quest Software's Packet Trap division, talks with Channelline CEO Robert Cohen about Packet Trap's offerings -- their flagship product, a remote monitoring tool for MSPs. And PSA product, a new service automation and ticketing tool to track orders and invoices.

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.

If you are anything like me, “spoiler alerts” on practically every online news and social network site means that I’ve spent some time over the last two week streaming coverage of the 2012 London Olympics at work via an on-network device – usually from my iPhone.  While watching one or two streaming videos from time to time isn’t that detrimental to my personal work productivity, IT professionals and small business owners quickly realize that streaming content can cause an even more substantial drain on network productivity.

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 Raju Shanbhaq
All over the world, companies are adopting remote management to manage their employees and their work. The number of tools that can be remotely managed has increased over the years, mainly because of the enhanced quality of computer programming and system designs.