OnPlus Service is offered at a list price of $250, which includes an OnPlus Network Agent appliance.
Expanding
on its offerings to small business partners, networking specialist Cisco
announced a cloud-based service called OnPlus that offers channel partners a
way to provide network assessment, management and advisory services to their
small business customers. By enabling value-added resellers (VARs) to create or
expand their managed services practice, OnPlus aims to help to evolve the
customer relationship from reactive and tactical to more proactive and strategic.
OnPlus
Service is offered at a list price of $250, which includes a three-year
subscription to the OnPlus service and an OnPlus Network Agent appliance. A
separate appliance and subscription service is required for each network being
managed. Native applications for Apple and Android mobile devices are available
free of charge in the Apple App Store and the Android Market.
The
announcement builds on Cisco's Partner Led sales model designed to elevate
channel partners' ability to drive sales in the small business and midmarket
segments. Earlier this year, Cisco announced it would invest $75 million in its
Partner Led initiative throughout 2012, for enablement, systems and support
capabilities to help channel partners profitably grow their business.
OnPlus
is designed for VARs that are looking to create or expand their managed service
offerings, providing remote visibility of the network and the devices attached
to the network, through a scalable cloud-based service, OnPlus helps VARs
deploy advanced network services for their small business customers from
anywhere at any time. To monitor a customer network, VARs plug the OnPlus
Network Agent appliance into a switch or router on their customer's network.
The OnPlus Agent then transmits information about the customer's network to a
secure data center for access by the VAR.
In
addition to discovery and monitoring of anything with an IP address from any
supplier, OnPlus enables remote connectivity to manageable network devices to
facilitate troubleshooting and configuration. For select Cisco devices, OnPlus
provides enhanced capabilities that automate typical administrative tasks. In
addition, the network-centric capability of OnPlus complements existing classes
of managed services tools such as remote monitoring and management and
professional services automation.
"Liberty
Technology focuses on making technology easy for both consumers and businesses.
With Cisco OnPlus, you're able to get a more complete, 360-degree picture of
your customer's network," said Ben Johnson, president of Liberty
Technology, a Cisco certified partner. "We've used OnPlus in a number of
scenarios from doing network surveys to quickly troubleshooting and identifying
problems with customer's networks, which has greatly saved us time and of
course money."
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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