The road for many management services providers (MSPs) hasn’t been a particularly smooth one. MSPs have struggled to find a niche and as a result mergers and acquisitions have abounded. Even the trade association supporting industry had to call it quits earlier this year.
One MSP that has avoided being snapped up by a larger fish is Bedford, Mass.-based InteQ Corp. It has continued to develop strategic alliances while also expanding its customer base, offering, for example, WiFi application management services in February.
Today, the company unveiled a new version of InfraPortal, its Web-based tool designed to offer real-time and historical views of an entire IT infrastructure.
The new version of the service is designed to provide more than 80 reports to offer both management level views of the infrastructure and detailed application- and device-specific breakdowns based on customer-defined metrics.
According to the company, the new features of InfraPortal include the following:
- Service Views: Designed to enable users
to group various infrastructure components, such as applications,
databases, servers, networks, under a system (e.g., CRM system, billing
system) and service (e.g., SAP service, corporate Web site) to create
business views that can be easily understood by anyone in the
organization. - Global Availability Status Indicator: Designed to provide a snapshot of the overall health of the IT
infrastructure, by site or across all locations, by immediately alerting
the user if there are any outages in their IT infrastructure. - Status Console: Now a standard component of InfraPortal, the status console allows users to
instantly get a snapshot of the entire IT infrastructure under
management, while expanding to show infrastructure components that are
down. - Inventory Console: Designed to list and detail the availability of all managed
and unmanaged components across the IT infrastructure and enables the
user to view any event, service desk ticket and downtime the component
may have experienced. - Dashboard: The customizable interface can be configured
based on user-defined performance indicators. - Search Consoles and Context Sensitive Navigation: All infrastructure components,
systems and services can be sorted and viewed by events, service desk
tickets, configuration, and downtime history. - Scheduling Capabilities: Designed to allow self-service management of IT
support schedules in one location or across all locations in a
distributed environment. Users, Inteq reports, can also schedule outages and
suppressions during maintenance to avoid false notifications. - Administration Capabilities: Allows the configuration of the
Dashboard as well as password management.
Inteq remains bullish not only on its technology but on the demand for it. “The market is still there for managed services,” Santhana Krishnan, chairman, co-founder and CEO, told ASPnews. “Companies want to selectively outsource.”
Perhaps one of the keys to Inteq’s apparent success is the flexibility it has on multiple levels. Its offers a mix of management services and professional services. “We have 35 solid MSP reference clients and about 135 professional services customers that pay on a project basis,” Krishnan said.
The company sells direct into several vertical markets, including financial services, manufacturing, retail/hospitality and healthcare. However, it also have impressive reseller partnership arrangements with companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Mercury Interactive, ARC, Remedy and others.
While many of Inteq’s competitors have been been acquired by larger companies, Inteq is talking growth and possibly looking to be on the buying end of an acquisition itself. “Our data center is at a good capacity right now, but we would look at acquisitions to add more customers, not new technology or services. But there’s no pressure to grow fast,” Krishnan told ASPnews. He added that the company expects to reach breakeven this quarter.
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