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At the GigaOm Structure conference, Spiceworks, which offers a free social IT management application, launched its Reach partner program, which is designed to enable providers of cloud-based services to reach the 1 million IT professionals using the company’s social IT management application. The program includes integration APIs and services that allow vendors to make their cloud services manageable from directly within Spiceworks.
The company noted the Reach program is part of their mission to simplify everything IT, includes helping its worldwide community of IT professionals to more easily find new technology products and services and manage their hybrid cloud-based and on-site IT environments through a free management application. The partner program includes a variety of ways for cloud services vendors to differentiate their offerings and distribute them to small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) around the world. Early Spiceworks Reach program partners include Rackspace, HP and Symantec. The program offers three levels of participation.
“Our new Reach partner program offers cloud vendors a simple and effective way to make their offerings instantly available to over 20 percent of SMB IT professionals worldwide,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “It’s a win for them and for small and medium businesses, which represent one of the fastest growing markets for cloud computing services.”
The first two levels consist of Cloud Services Inventory and Monitoring which provides basic account and service information for cloud service offerings that ensures they can be managed and monitored by the 1 million users of Spiceworks and the Cloud Management Plug-ins, which allows cloud services vendors to deliver custom plug-ins for Spiceworks that give users additional granular management and monitoring capabilities. More than 140 Spiceworks management plug-ins are currently available for both cloud services and on-premise technology, including the Storage Advisor sponsored by EMC and the Maintenance Manager sponsored by Intel.
The third level consists of the Cloud Service Distribution program, which distributes management capabilities for cloud services to 1 million IT pros by integrating the ability to add, manage and monitor cloud services within the Spiceworks application. Integration APIs enable categories of services, such as hosted e-mail, remote management, and security to be built into Spiceworks. Examples include Rackspace’s Cloud Email Services and LogMeIn Rescue.
“As my company adds more and more cloud services, switching between 10 different Web-based portals to monitor and provision cloud resources is not an efficient approach to cloud management,” said Justin Davison, systems engineer for the technical consulting firm RJ Lee Group. “With Spiceworks, I can learn about new cloud services and then manage the ones I use in the same place I manage all my in-house IT assets.”