The company adds automated discovery to its release of Nimbus Winter '07, in a feature called No Touch Nimbus.Nimsoft, as part of its effort to be the vendor to bring service-level management to medium-sized enterprises, set its sights on both midsize enterprises and managed services providers on Feb. 12 with the release of the latest version of its IT infrastructure monitoring tool, Nimbus.
The small but fast-growing company added automated discovery to the Winter 07 release of Nimbus, allowing the tool to automatically discover infrastructure components and link those into agentless monitoring to reduce the administrative overhead of the tool.
The feature, dubbed No Touch Nimbus, is intended to reduce the time and effort required to implement and maintain the tool.
"We discover the environment and apply monitoring to it automatically and set thresholds automatically for the customer with no intervention," said Gary Read, president and CEO of the privately held firm, based in Redwood City, Calif. "The customer can start discovery, and it discovers the environment and plugs in monitoring automatically with thresholds, and by the time they come back from lunch, they have a fully working solution with dashboards displayed, reports and alerting switched on," he said.
No Touch Nimbus also automatically produces a series of historical reports, executes real-time alerting and produces a series of real-time dashboards to give operators a quick view of the health of the infrastructure, the company said.
For Nimsofts growing base of MSP customers, the Nimbus Winter 07 version also adds a new multi-tenant architecture that allows operators to create on-demand reports specific to customers from the Nimbus Enterprise Console interface.
"It provides them with the ability to have a single Nimbus that exists on one server with one database and one user interface, and yet they can manage hundreds of other customer environments from that," Read said.
That feature is "awesome," according to user Tim Lambrecht, CEO of InCompass IT, an MSP in St Paul, Minn. "Instead of going into someones network, we can go to the one server and look at multiple tenants from it," Lambrecht said. He added that the No Touch Nimbus feature also reduces the set-up time for the product.
Click here to read about Nimsofts stand-alone software probe that provides monitoring for Ciscos CallManager.
Lambrecht, who formerly worked with Hewlett-Packards OpenView, was initially skeptical of the functionality and price tag of Nimbus, but quickly became a believer, he said. "We havent been able to find a function that has not matched what we needed from an IT perspective. And we work with a lot of health organizations that need that 100 percent uptime and it needs to be fast," he said.
Nimsoft, which expanded its business 110 percent in the fourth quarter and is profitable, has "a better focus on the midmarket than anybody else," said Dennis Callahan, enterprise software analyst for The 451 Group. However, "They are winning larger deals, but they will have to do more to keep up that kind of growth," he said.
Toward that end, Nimsoft in December concluded its first round of venture funding to help accelerate growth.
To be effective, Nimsoft will have to broaden its reach geographically and show potential larger customers how they fit into the overall IT "ecosystem" of operations management, said David Williams, an industry analyst with Gartner. "They do one thing really well: availability management. Where they are challenged is how to fit this technology into the bigger picture," he said.
Nimbus Winter 07 is available now.
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