MSPmentor

Paessler AG, an old hand in the network monitoring game with more than a decade of experience, is taking a fresh look at the managed services market. I spoke to Ken Sanofsky, Paessler’s general manager for North America, about the company’s push into the managed services channel. Here’s a recap of the conversation.

Sanofsky joined Paessler in September 2009 after previously building channel and partner alliances for such companies as PathSolutions and Cisco Systems.

Based in Nuremberg, Bavaria/Germany, Paessler has sold more than 50,000 licenses, and has more than 150,000 active installations worldwide, including various freeware products, the company says.

Paessler considers its key rivals to include names like Nimsoft and SolarWinds. Privately held Nimsoft positions itself as both an MSP solution and enterprise alternative to the Big Four systems management platforms (BMC, CA, Hewlett-Packard OpenView and IBM Tivoli). SolarWinds, another growing network management software provider, launched its IPO in May 2009.

So what sets Paessler apart from the competition? Their main edge (apart from their belief that they have a superior product), they claim, is that they undersell their rivals. Sanofsky asserts that customers rarely pay more than $8500 for a full installation of Network Monitor with unlimited network probing privileges. Plus, the company’s PRTG Network Monitor software can come “online in minutes,” Sanofsky says.

Paessler claims to have a loyal user base of MSPs, but they’ve only recently started their push into the channel in any kind of formal way. Sanofsky says that they’re always on the lookout for new service providers with whom to partner — though some key channel partners are already in place. Examples include Insight, SHI International and SoftChoice. But Paessler isn’t stopping there. “We want to bring monitoring to MSPs in an affordable way,” he says.

We’ll be watching.

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