Management service provider SevenSpace Inc. on Monday will announce the integration of its services with Stratasource.
SevenSpace at the same time will launch a series of new, more flexible service offerings—some new, some repackaged from existing offerings–intended to better fit the requirements of individual customers.
“Theyre modular services that let us work more hand in hand with the CIO to analyze what their infrastructure and application monitoring needs are and tailor those services,” said Brian Winter, vice president of business development for SevenSpace, in Chantilly, Va. The services are designed to augment the existing skills in a given IT department instead of swapping out whats already in place.
The application and infrastructure management services are grouped into four categories: Management and Monitoring Services, Enhanced Services, Security Services, and Optimization 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 of 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],” said Winter.
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 reporting and performance tuning.
The new Optimization Services provide hands-on help from professionals for capacity planning, contingency planning, migration planning and execution.
SevenSpace, in its acquisition of Stratasource, 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 management service provider 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 Jamine Noel 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,” said Noel, director of systems and application management at Hurwitz Group.