Packet Island Releases SaaS-based Network Monitoring and Diagnostics Solution
08/09/2008
Packet Island Inc. announced a product offering designed for managed service providers delivering managed services to the SMB market. Called IT-911, this service bundle includes a 4" x 5" remote monitoring micro appliance and seven days of on-demand remote monitoring and diagnostics for the price of the box and a yearly usage fee.
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If additional days of monitoring are desired, these are billable to the end customer at an average rate of $30/day -- creating a new revenue stream for the service provider offering this enhanced support. When problems occur at the customer site, service providers can turn the micro appliance on and off as needed, instead of sending a team of experts to visit the site, which normally costs an average of $300. For those customers who value continuous monitoring, IT-911 is easily upgradeable to VoIPCare; Packet Island's hosted solution for 24x7 monitoring and report generation.
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Unlike traditional SNMP-based solutions which focus on monitoring network devices, IT-911 allows service providers to use a flow monitoring approach to get to the root cause of converged media issues. IT-911's features include the ability to view data and VoIP flows to characterize congestion problems and isolate the problem sources, generate comprehensive reports showing call quality and the state of the network, perform packet captures to perform advanced debugging, and load the network with up to 25 concurrent calls to periodically assess WAN performance with or without QOS parameters.
According to Jay Cuthrell, CTO of Digitel Corporation, ⌠Today it is imperative to do 24x7 monitoring of customer networks. This is particularly important because we are now delivering real-time converged media services over networks that are constantly evolving. However, the reality is that a majority of the SMB market is very price sensitive. As a result, many SMBs do not yet value the importance of 24x7 monitoring. However, when problems set in, these SMBs end up having to pay a lot of money in truck rolls and hourly wages of technician time to troubleshoot these problems. This is a lose-lose situation for both the SMB and the service provider and needs to be avoided for growth to continue in the Managed Services space. Increasingly, truck rolls now include a fuel surcharge fee that shifts the economics even further towards remote insight systems such as Packet Island's products."
Per Bernie Leung, President of Mesatech, ⌠We are delighted to have found such a useful tool, and plan to deploy IT-911 in all our new installations as an added feature for our customers.
According to Praveen Kumar, Packet Island CEO, ⌠IT-911 represents a breakthrough in managed service offerings for MSPs delivering converged media services -- as our micro appliance is permanently deployed in the end customer's network, it is there when needed, which means faster data analysis, and lightening-fast problem resolution for key customers.
Packet Island creates scalable solutions that allow Enterprise IT managers and service providers to pinpoint network, signaling, or equipment based problems affecting voice quality in minutes. Solutions are available that allow 24/7 monitoring of real time traffic and signaling net flows remotely, removing the need for staffing each site of a multi-site enterprise with IT experts. Each solution features the ability to view individual calls, UDP vs TCP/IP traffic flows, dropped packet stats, QOS, jitter, and the ability to perform remote packet captures with Ethereal/wireshark interoperability to quickly diagnose or predict network issues.
IT-911 is available for purchase either directly from Packet Island, or through Packet Island's distributor; cyLogistics (www.cyLogistics.com). From now until the end of August, any service provider purchasing at least four IT-911 remote monitoring boxes at a time will receive 10% off the initial yearly service fee for the first year.
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