From The Expert Feature Article
May 16, 2013

Interop Vegas Travelogue: MSP News in Spades, Part 3


This is the third piece in my series chronicling the companies I met at Interop Las Vegas (click the link for more information), with a special focus on their innovations in the MSP arena. If you missed some of my previous coverage of MSPs at Interop, click this link as well. And you can read my final thoughts on this technology event by clicking this link. I think you’ll find this group as interesting as I did.

ESET

Security company ESET already has some 100 million endpoints it protects. But the company wants more, and at Interop announced plans to go after the Microsoft (News - Alert) SharePoint Server 2013 market.

The new tool, now shipping, offers anti-virus protection for the recent SharePoint edition. This fills a critical void as Microsoft plans to take its SharePoint Forefront protection product off the market in 2015.

RIT/Beamcaster

Beamcaster, owned by RIT Wireless, got its start in 1989 and today replaces cable network infrastructure with wireless and manages this from the cloud.

This is a different sort of wireless, using optics or beams of light to move data traffic.

The company showed off its wares to me and the other Interop attendees. "We designed the Beamcaster to eliminate the trade-off between wireless networking's ease-of-installation and flexibility with the high-security and performance needed in today's enterprises," said Motti Hania , Deputy CEO of RiT Technologies (News - Alert). "A Beamcaster network - whether used as a primary network or a cost-effective backup - can be installed from beginning to end in just hours. If an office has to move floors or even to a whole new building, the network can pack up and move with you for immediate coverage. This simple and elegant new solution answers the real needs of IT managers and system integrators."

Cetrom

I moseyed on over to Cetrom, an 11 year-old cloud and IT service provider that has a 99.99 percent uptime guarantee.

The service provider has 150 applications to which it provides secure access to on-premises and mobile workers. It can also take your existing apps and virtualize them.

AirWatch (News - Alert)

Running late, I literally flew over to AirWatch, which offers mobile device management, mobile content management and mobile application management to some 6,500 shops globally. There should be no worried about AirWatch finances. The vendor recently snagged $200 million in venture capital from Insight Venture Partners.

Peer 1 Hosting

My visit with Peer 1 Hosting was pretty cool, as I somehow remembered the company made it into Gartner’s (News - Alert) Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting. They were impressed.

Peer 1 drives its managed hosting services off a dozen North American data centers, buttressed by four more in Europe.

Gartner described the company’s strength, saying, “customers that use multiple data centers from Peer 1 do not pay transit costs across its backbone network. This may provide significant cost savings for some application and workload scenarios.”

On the downside, Gartner said, “With the sole exception of Microsoft Exchange, Peer 1 does not provide support for modern enterprise applications.”

APCON (News - Alert)

APCON, a security and network monitoring provider, was my next stop. And the news that APCON debuted its new technology partner program at Interop was music to this MSP mavens ears.

NetIQ

NetIQ is a network industry vet and offers security and access management, as well as workload, service, application and systems management.

A few years back, TMC gave NetIQ’s VoIP Manager product the TMC Labs Innovation Award. This award is for “unique products that make a significant contribution toward improving communications technology. VoIP Manager is one of only 12 products to be singled out by TMC Labs engineers as being truly innovative.”

Xirrus

High-performance wireless company Xirrus was one of many making news at the show.

The company used Vegas to showcase its Unified Access portfolio, a “suite of cloud services, Wi-Fi access solutions, Ethernet switches, management tools, and application programming interfaces that enable organizations to bring together disparate wired and wireless network components into a unified network,” the company said at the show.

NETGEAR

When I hear the name NETGEAR, I think of the many wireless routers from the company I’ve used over the years. But there is much more to the company than Wi-Fi.

In Las Vegas, for example, NETGEAR beefed up its ReadyDATA line of storage devices with the ReadyDATA, which is the company’s first desktop form ReadyDATA device. This new storage device can work in a hybrid cloud scenario where ReadyDATA does backup on-premises and replicates the data to the cloud for a further level of protection.

According to Gartner, NETGEAR was “the number one vendor for total NAS/unified storage unit shipments in 2012.”

Not a bad group of companies! Check back tomorrow for the fourth and final installment in this series.





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