SilverBack Technologies Inc., a leading full-service Management Service Provider (MSP), Monday (Jan 8) announced that Cognex Corporation, the world’s leading supplier of machine vision systems, has selected its InfoCare service to provide advanced IT monitoring, security and reporting capabilities to help deliver information services more cost-effectively.
“IT managers can spend lots of time chasing down problems, using a number of disparate tools that are not integrated,” Skip MacAskill, SilverBack VP marketing, told ASP News. “When we explain that we can give them one place to go for information, in real time, with a big-picture view of their systems, you can immediately see the light bulbs going off.”
SilverBack’s InfoCare solution is a management service that enables businesses to run their IT computing environments more proactively and efficiently. InfoCare provides multiple monitoring, reporting and security applications within a single subscription-based service offering. All applications are integrated and hosted securely on the customer’s site, providing maximum application control and guaranteed access. SilverBack’s turnkey installation and maintenance model, broad suite of features and overall ease of use correlate to increased network uptime and improved IT efficiency.
Cognex has chosen to implement SilverBack’s base InfoCare service and plans to roll out additional services and features during the coming months. Since deployment, Cognex has realized significantly improved IT efficiency through the ability to deploy valued IT resources and staff members to other areas of IT, including capacity planning and proactive network monitoring and reporting.
InfoCare is the foundation that future SilverBack offerings will build on, said MacAskill. At this point, SilverBack customers are at the point where they benefit most from the assessment and discovery of their network, alert and escalation features, performance metrics, and security scanning — all features of InfoCare. “People still need to know the basics — what’s in their environment. You have to start with the fundamentals,” he said.
“We’ll be adding value-added offerings as we expand our scope,” MacAskill said. “It’s one thing to be able to understand your technical environment. It’s quite another to understand the business-level environment and see how the business itself is affected by the technology.”
For Cognex, a multinational company with revenue of approximately $250 million and regional offices throughout the U.S. and overseas, InfoCare provides a cost-effective IT management service which delivers multiple industry-leading software applications including performance monitoring, asset inventory, security scanning and alert escalation for better care of networks.
“We have only had InfoCare up and running for four weeks now, and already we’ve seen dramatic IS improvements through the ability to proactively capture and analyze valuable network and systems information to help us better control our IT resources,” said Bob Cuneo, director of IT at Cognex. “In minutes I was receiving actionable IT information that I wasn’t getting from our previous reporting system. With InfoCare, I have access to real-time data that is specific to each device within my network and systems environment. For the first time in recent memory, I control the network; the network doesn’t control me.”
Cognex Corporation designs, develops, manufactures and markets machine vision systems, or computers that can “see.” Cognex’s Modular Vision Systems Division, headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts, specializes in machine vision systems, which are used for automating the manufacture of a wide range of discrete items and for assuring their quality.
Cognex’s Surface Inspection Systems Division, headquartered in Alameda, California, specializes in machine vision systems, also known as web
inspection systems, which are used for inspecting the surfaces of products manufactured in a continuous fashion, such as metals, paper, and plastics. In addition to its corporate headquarters in Natick, Massachusetts, Cognex also has regional offices located throughout North America, Japan, Europe and Southeast Asia.
SilverBack Technologies, a privately held company headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts, was founded in spring 1999 by former executives of Nortel Networks Corporation and Micromuse Inc. SilverBack is an industry pioneer MSP, and a founding and executive member of the MSP Association, an international industry consortium formed to define, shape and promote the emerging managed network services sector to aid in accelerating the adoption of MSPs.
SilverBack derives its name from the eldest member of the African mountain gorilla species, whose defining characteristics include leadership, loyalty, adaptability, dependability and an ongoing commitment to protect other members of the gorilla band. SilverBack is a patron of the Gorilla Foundation, which promotes the protection, preservation and propagation of gorillas.
