Technology Reseller - v25

37 IT MONITORING technolog y reseller.co.uk continued... and customer relationships. “IT infrastructures are far more complex today than they were just three or five years ago,” he said. “Organisations are moving to the cloud at a dramatic rate and they are embracing new technologies, such as software defined wide area networks. The monitoring tools that many of these organisations have used for years aren’t necessarily able to cope with complex new environments or the pace of change, so you start to get gaps in coverage. That’s where LogicMonitor’s value proposition is very strong. We provide a unified monitoring platform that allows you to monitor everything in your infrastructure, from the network through to the servers, the virtualised environments, the applications layer. We monitor more than 2,000 different technologies out of the box. Not only that, but our customers are able to extend the capability of the platform very easily through scripting.” As well as increasing the likelihood of gaps in visibility, the complexity of today’s IT environments adds to the management burden for organisations that might already have half a dozen or more monitoring platforms. “Where LogicMonitor wins is in tool consolidation. Enterprises are over the moon when they come across a product More than half (53%) of IT outages and brownouts experienced by UK businesses – and 97% of businesses have experienced one – are avoidable, claims LogicMonitor, provider of a SaaS- based performance monitoring platform for enterprise IT and IT service providers. According to its new report, IT Outage Impact Study 2019 , the most common causes of downtime are network failure, software malfunction, usage spikes/ surges, third party provider outages, human error and configuration error. Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer of LogicMonitor, suggests that many of these incidents could be avoided simply by identifying when critical hardware or software performance is trending downwards or when usage is moving towards a danger level (e.g. when there is more traffic than the network can handle or when a primary storage share is running out of space). While IT infrastructure monitoring has long been standard practice, Banfield suggests that the complexity of today’s environments means that many businesses have gaps in their coverage that is putting them at risk, not just of IT outages, but also of degraded performance, e.g. latency and delays on websites, that can be just as damaging to a company’s reputation Filling in the gaps Following a recent survey highlighting the avoidable problem of IT outages, James Goulding spoke to Mark Banfield about how LogicMonitor enables its enterprise and managed service provider customers to avoid IT outages TR: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing channel businesses today? TM: The channel feels like it is becoming smaller, with an increasing number of mergers and acquisitions, particularly involving traditional hardware telcos on the hunt for recurring revenues. There is also a change in larger American players offering master agent models, which I don’t believe always work with the diversity of our channel, especially in voice and video. There is currently so much choice that the channel has to be the training ground for sales people and clients alike. Sadly, I think there is still a tendency for many firms to overpromise on things they don’t fully understand, just to get the sale. This needs to change – which brings me back to collaboration. TR: Could vendors and distributors do more to help you overcome them? And, if so, what? TM: I think it’s a tough call. Non-cloud specialists, for example, are all fighting for the share of the market that is relevant to them. If a customer expresses a cloud need that the VAR can’t satisfy, the threat from competition increases massively, so they do what they can to protect the relationship. I genuinely believe partnerships, rather than fake promises, are the key to this. I go back to education, which I think the distributors are getting much better at. Utilising technology to help the channel – whether harnessing video, webinars or other online apps – will help to continually foster channel-wide relationships by driving that all-important ongoing communication and learning. TR: Are customers becoming more demanding and, if so, in what ways? TM: Customers are becoming more switched on. Technology is appearing in their inboxes or on social media and they are asking questions as to how it could work within their businesses. They’re questioning – could it save time, efficiencies, make more profit, or generally help us win more work? This can only be a good thing; inquisitiveness and innovation go hand in hand, as long as the right people have a voice at the table. TR: If you could change one aspect of your job what would it be and why? TM: I’d like more time. vapourcloud.com Mark Banfield