* Infonet goes on FirstWatch
Infonet is offering remote management services for an array of customer-based network gear – including switches, routers, firewalls and servers – through a new service called FirstWatch that became globally available Jan. 11.
Infonet entered into a partnership with NUVO Networks from Ottawa, Canada to offer remote monitoring, reporting and management of client-owned network infrastructure elements. Previously, Infonet offered management services only up to the client’s on-premise routers but not the WAN or LAN devices beyond them.
With FirstWatch, Infonet can monitor any make or model of network, security, IP telephony or server system. FirstWatch supports servers running all operating systems, including Unix, Linux and Windows.
“What clients have out there are hundreds of different devices from Cisco, Nortel and others,” explains Andrew McBride, product marketing manager for First Watch. “On each of these devices, we’re able to offer multiple levels of service.”
Customers can choose from basic monitoring and alerting to performance management, change management, configuration management and complete problem resolution.
The FirstWatch service ranges from $1 to $10 per device per day, depending on the range of services purchased.
“A customer might have 20 different servers,” McBride explains. “For a couple, they’ll only want monitoring and alerting. For a few, they might want change management and configuration management. Then for the most important servers, they might want everything up through problem management. Clients can pick and choose what services they want by device.”
Information from FirstWatch is available to customers through a single portal – myinfonet.com – that allows customers to look at status information for all their devices.
“Other carriers and systems integrators have partnerships with NUVO Networks, but I think what sets the Infonet service apart somewhat is the degree of integration with the Infonet portal,” says Ron Kaplan, research manager at IDC.
No special hardware or software is required for FirstWatch, and companies do not need to purchase WAN services from Infonet in order to buy FirstWatch.
Infonet has been beta testing the FirstWatch service with five companies.
One customer, who Infonet declined to name, is a chemical manufacturer that purchased FirstWatch for 40 network devices. This customer was having problems with its Citrix servers.
“We were able to determine the exact nature of the outages,” McBride says. “One was a network issue that was occurring randomly and the other was an issue of configuration and management of change control in the Citrix environment.”
McBride says FirstWatch helped the chemical company “eliminate almost $400,000 of downtime cost in one year.” The cost for this client: less than $5 per day, per device.
Infonet is targeting FirstWatch at multinationals that don’t have dedicated IT staff in remote offices. “What companies usually want is a small amount of FirstWatch help within headquarters but more robust, complete services for remote offices,” McBride says.
“About 82% of the time, we can fix the problem and we don’t have to dispatch somebody,” McBride adds. “The other 18% of the time, we can dispatch the client’s maintenance staff and have the maintenance staff can take care of it.”
IDC projects moderate growth for managed WAN services like FirstWatch. “We’re not seeing huge growth, but we are seeing respectable, constant growth,” Kaplan says.
Infonet, a top-tier ISP, recently announced plans to merge with BT. The deal is expected to be finalized by June 2005.
