Ipanema Technologies, a French company named after a Brazilian beach (“The Girl from Ipanema,” anyone?) is equipping its worldwide base of MSPs with a new management tool that fits in the palm of its hand.
Ipanema’s main MSP management tool is AppsWorks, a service that now boasts a broader range of mobile capabilities.
MSPs and IT are both often on the move but still need to get things done. “As both IT networking professionals and their end-users are increasingly working around the clock and out of the office, network oversight and maintenance as well as application performance control is of utmost importance,” said Rogier van der Wal, vice president of cloud services for Ipanema Technologies. “Understanding the needs and demand of all parties is intrinsic to Ipanema, and that is why we have delivered a solution that guarantees that the essential applications and networks businesses rely upon can be managed anytime, anywhere, using the various mobile devices that have become essential tools.”
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One feature, aimed at the channel, is the “ability to change the business criticality of their customer's applications, directly through the service portal. Previously, service administrators and enterprise customers were required to wait until the next business day for validation,” Ipanema said.
An AppsWorks Primer
AppsWorks is a service that offers application visibility and guarantees application performance.
On the visibility side, the service can show how an app is being used and its performance levels – which can be defined in the form of an Application Quality Score (AQS).
It can even look historically at app performance, such as by hour, day, week or by month.
To help ensure that critical apps (such as the CEO’s Excel) perform, AppsWorks offers dynamic bandwidth control.
Besides letting IT set bandwidth based on how critical an apps is (maybe like the CEO’s Saleforce.com account), it can also “protect the real-time characteristics of time sensitive application flows such as Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) or hosted virtual desktop communication,” the company said.
Finally, AppsWorks does WAN optimization, which is a similar technology to bandwidth allocation.
The MSP Story
On the managed service provider front, Ipanema describes its benefits this way:
- “Deliver application-centric services which provide a direct coupling between the enterprise business objectives and the delivered value;
- Capture IT budgets by linking the service value to enterprises’ IT transformations like cloud computing, Unified Communications, desktop virtualization and hybrid networking;
- Increase profitability by focusing sales strategies away from commoditized MPLS and improve margin through to higher value network services;
- Reduce churn and acquire new customers by selling innovative and high value services. Enable full visibility over application usage and performance over the network.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
