How and why Ingenica developed ManageView.
I recently met with Ingenica Limited to discuss the company’s new network management product for small and midsized businesses called ManageView. The story of how the company developed the product, and how it plans to reach the SMB market makes for an interesting story.
I recently met with Ingenica Limited to discuss the company’s new network management product for small and midsized businesses called ManageView. The story of how the company developed the product, and how it plans to reach the SMB market makes for an interesting story.
Toronto company Ingenica, which used to be known as UniPrint and Qnetix, is best known for its UniPrint suite of products. This suite of products eases printing through server-based systems, allowing users to print to any network printer whether they have that printer’s drivers loaded or not. Originally sold for Citrix systems, the product is now available for Unix servers, AS/400 and Web servers.
ManageView provides Citrix MetaFrame and Windows Terminal Server management through a combination of inexpensive subscriptions ($79 per server, retail), and hosted support services (at the Bell Canada Data Center). The ManageView software on each server sends data to the hosted database at Ingenica. The administrators who run the ManageView DashBoard are able to see a graphical information display,which is prepared by Ingenica. Any server events that require attention will trigger alarms at Ingenica, which then notifies customers via e-mail, pagers, cell phones, etc.
How is this different from one of the many server monitoring products, such as the What’s Up Gold product line I mentioned back in July? Polly Galita, director of sales and marketing, says the company is focused on Citrix servers and believes the product is attractively priced.
Citrix licenses are based on cost per user, so hung sessions or sessions used by the wrong employees waste money. Information about the Citrix load on the system, and active session details, reassure administrators all is well. Historical data collected over time tips users to trends, good and bad, in server performance. If you have a Citrix system, download the free trial and tell me what you think.
Galita says Ingenica initially built the product for internal use. “It proved valuable for us and our customers, and after more than a year of internal production use we decided to put it on the market.” This makes an interesting point about product development. Many vendors make a product then look for a market. Ingenica took an internal product built to ease its own management chores and ultimately realized that others probably faced the same problems.
But how does a 40 person company market its product to the legions of SMBs who use Citrix? Rolling out the product at the recent Citrix iForum made sense. In addition to that, Ingenica started a reseller program. Citrix resellers who install and maintain Citrix installations and who sell management and support contracts can use ManageView to show customers how well their Citrix system runs.
Better yet, ManageView allows those resellers with support contracts to receive alerts from Ingenica about customer systems and start fixing problems even before their customers notice the problem. Disk in a Citrix server nearly full? By the time the customer notices, the support person may be knocking on their door, additional disk in hand.
While Ingenica fits into the small biz category with 40 employees, it is actually now owned by Bell Business Solutions, a division of Bell Canada. But Galita claims Ingenica is a “silo” within the large Bell Canada family, left alone by corporate to stay focused on its market segment. “I will always fight to keep our small business feel and entrepreneurial spirit,” Galita says.
