Management service provider SevenSpace Inc. last week said it will integrate all its services with those of StrataSource Inc. and launch a series of more flexible service offerings—some new, some repackaged from existing offerings—intended to better fit the requirements of customers.
“Theyre modular services that let us work with the CIO to analyze infrastructure and application monitoring needs,” said Brian Winter, vice president of business development for SevenSpace, in Chantilly, Va. The services are designed to augment skills in an IT department instead of swapping out whats in place.
The services fall into four categories: Management and Monitoring Services, Security Services, Optimization Services, and Enhanced Services.
In its integration effort, SevenSpace has applied the StrataSource library of scripts that automate remediation of problem monitoring and break/fix functions to all its service offerings.
“Now when we deploy an agent on a box and determine with the IT department what remediation steps they want us to perform, we can integrate that into the agent code and automatically [perform the function],” Winter said.
In its Security Services, SevenSpace added a new option to automatically notify the customer when relevant new patches become available, and it has added new intrusion detection services.
Under its Enhanced Services, SevenSpace will also perform installation of patches. Other new services added under the Enhanced rubric include procurement management, change management, backup and restore services, recoverability analysis, trends analysis, and performance tuning.
The Optimization Services provide hands-on help from professionals for capacity planning, contingency planning, migration planning and execution.
SevenSpace, in its acquisition of StrataSource, said it believes it will have more than 100 customers by years end. And it expects a ramp-up of new customers as a result of its broadened distribution channel.
But analysts watching the MSP space are cautious about the prospects for survival for many MSPs. At least one analyst questioned SevenSpaces ability to scale after it reduced its staff to 90 employees and added more “people-intensive” services, according to Jasmine Noel, an analyst at Hurwitz Group, in Framingham, Mass.
“If youve done all the correlation work needed and have a lot of automated correlation and fixes, you can manage a hell of a lot with very few people. But its still people-intensive to define a project, and that will limit how fast they can grow,” Noel said.