Eaton Corp.‘s power quality group has shipped a plug-in that lets users of its Intelligent Power Manager offering access data and features from inside the ConnectWise Automate RMM application.
The new integration, which Eaton discussed with ChannelPro during its 2022 partner conference in April, is available now at no cost to IPM users via the ConnectWise Automate Solution Center.
IPM is a tool for remotely monitoring, managing, and controlling UPS and power distribution gear from Eaton and other manufacturers. Deploying the Automate plug-in lets MSPs view device status information, alerts, and alarms from IPM through the same interface they use to manage other hardware on a customer’s network.
“It puts IPM in the tool that they’re using day to day, day in and day out,” says Mike Jackson, director of offer management for data center software at Eaton.
According to Jackson, Eaton’s MSP partners view remote management of power gear as an attractive way to differentiate themselves from competitors and augment monthly recurring revenue. “They can only make so much money off of selling a new UPS, but that service that they tie to it is much more lucrative,” he says.
Adding MSPs to its partner base has been a priority since 2019 at Eaton, which plans to introduce an MSP partner program later this year.
IPM is part of Eaton’s Brightlayer management software portfolio, which also includes Visual Power Manager, a distributed power infrastructure management tool, and Visual Capacity Optimization Manager, a data center infrastructure management solution. By the end of this year, those systems and others will become fully integrated components of a new all-encompassing management application also named Brightlayer.
Eaton increasingly views software as a strategic resource for landing new customers and generating annuity income for itself and its channel.
Embedding IPM functionality in third-party management systems is an established practice at Eaton, which has long let VMware users administer power quality devices, receive alerts, measure power consumption, and trigger live workload migrations during power outages via VMware’s vCenter Server and vRealize Operations platforms.
“We realize that we’re not the sole software that anybody’s going to use,” Jackson says, “so it’s all about how well can we tie our systems to processes and systems that our customers are already using.”
At present, the new IPM plug-in doesn’t support ConnectWise’s two other RMM solutions, the cloud-based Command product and the next-generation ConnectWise RMM system unveiled last November. According to Jackson, Eaton is weighing whether or not to create plug-ins for those products, as well as the Kaseya VSA and Datto RMM platforms.
Eaton shipped a new edition of IPM with a wizard-based feature designed to make utilizing the system’s automated policy-based incident remediation functionality simpler a year ago.
