If you’re a VAR looking to leverage infrastructure management as a backbone for your managed services offerings, NetEnrich is looking for you. The San Jose, Calif.-based company, which provides what it calls “closet to cloud” remote IT infrastructure management, has just retooled its Small Business Services (SBS) Suite after feedback from partners highlighted some challenges with the offering after it was released on April 1.
“VARs came to us and said they were interested in the Small Business Services Suite, then they would start to point out some challenges we had—either price to value, or the pricing was too complex, or it wasn’t bundled effectively for the SMB market,” says Justin Crotty, senior vice president and general manager at NetEnrich Inc. “We took that feedback to heart and have relaunched SBS so it’s very easy to consume and easy to understand, [with a] very simplified pricing structure that we think has the small to medium VAR in mind.”
What that means, says Crotty, is that the suite makes it easy for VARs to self-order, -scope, and -quote, which they couldn’t do with the previous SBS. “There’s a bundle at the base price and a lot of a la carte capabilities they can add on,” he says, “so they can take it themselves and scope their own customers and understand what the cost is going to be.”
Pricing for the base bundle of 1 to 5 SMB clients is $159 a month. That includes one server and an operating system—including up to three business-critical infrastructure applications that will be monitored and managed with patching and anti-virus updates—plus a fully managed firewall and ISP management. “We do up/down monitoring on the bandwidth to the firewall and monthly utilization reporting,” notes Crotty.
Also included in the SBS package are:
- ITIL-based standard operating procedure practices on device alerts and alert remediation, with vendor technical support for the infrastructure applications and firewall
- Desktop preventative care, including anti-virus updates for up to five desktops
- Business-critical SBS IT operation reports
NetEnrich offers tiered discounts depending on the number of end clients VARs have under management. “As a VAR brings more clients to us,” says Crotty, “we reward that VAR by dropping their aggregate cost across all their clients on a monthly basis.”
NetEnrich’s Service Delivery Framework offers a “single pane of glass” view into an end client’s server and network environment and infrastructure applications. As Crotty explains it, “The VAR has a complete 360-degree view of the infrastructure of any given client regardless of where that infrastructure is being served from, and can see everything we’re doing. They can take asset information, ticket information. They can see what we’re doing on that infrastructure. They can see the history of that piece of equipment and what we’ve done on it.”
The company’s short-term goal for SBS is to get 15 to 20 VARs on the platform in the next eight weeks. Longer term, NetEnrich hopes SBS will be seen as a great way for VARs to get into managed services or for MSPs to scale their business without having to invest the capital needed to do so.
SBS is available now in North America exclusively through the services division of distributor Ingram Micro Inc., Santa Ana, Calif. For more information, go to www.netenrich.com or www.ingrammicrocloud.com.
