NaviSite Inc. on Monday will introduce its own stab at moving beyond the commodity hosting business model by offering a set of new packages designed to be delivered through systems integrators and resellers.
The Always On Advantage Series of packaged service offerings is intended to be combined with heavily customized applications such as Siebel or PeopleSoft and then resold to end customers, according to Steve Kirchoff, executive vice president of marketing for NaviSite in Houston.
The packaging of the services is unique, believes Kirchoff. “The industry was focused on custom-building everything. But this is all about repeatable solutions that can be customized by integrators for specific customer needs,” he said.
The managed services packages are designed for regional systems integrators and midsized companies. Overall, however, NaviSite intends to continue selling its managed services directly to end customers who want to deal direct with the company, and it will continue to pursue partnerships with large vendors such as its Compaq partnership. Compaq in fact has an equity stake in the managed services provider.
Unlike competitors, NaviSite will provide management all the way up through the applications stack, to take on managing Oracle, PeopleSoft and other enterprise-class applications.
“We do monitoring, end-user support, patches, help desk, change management, new releases, troubleshooting and resolution,” said Sydney Kuo, product business unit manager in Andover, Mass. “In conjunction with hosting services we are providing end-to-end services from Internet connectivity to network and database and application management,” he added.
The new service packages also provide reporting through the NaviSite portal.
Systems integrators can reference-sell the service packages, package their own services and/or applications on top of them, or embed the NaviSite services as elements of their own private-labeled services.
The four service packages include Application Advantage for business applications like the Oracle eBusiness Suite and the Availability Advantage for high-availability managed applications, which provides a base 99.9 percent uptime guarantee or enhanced 99.99 percent availability service-level agreement. It uses redundant configurations to achieve those availability levels.
The third package, the Intranet Advantage, is intended for Web applications internally directed toward employees. It provides security, server management, and monitoring of hardware, Web servers, databases and applications.
The fourth package, Internet Advantage, is intended for external Web applications and includes the features of the Intranet package plus high-speed, burstable connectivity and redundant firewalls.
All four services are available now and range from $1.600 per month up to $24,000 per month, depending on configuration and SLA.