Packet Island (News - Alert) recently launched IT-911 a new product offering that is designed for managed service providers (MSPs) serving the small and medium business (SMB) market. Packet Island’s new service bundle includes a small 4” x 5” remote monitoring micro appliance and seven days of full on-demand remote monitoring and diagnostics. All this is being offered for the price of the box and a low yearly usage fee.

 

The company’s officials explain that if companies want to have additional days of monitoring, these are billable to the end customer at an average rate of $30 per day. In the event when problems occur at the customer site, service providers have the option of turning the micro appliance on and off and they don’t have to send a team of experts to visit the site. By doing so the companies save an average of $300 per avoided site visit.

 

IT-911 can also be easily upgradeable to VoIPCare, Packet Island’s hosted solution for 24x7 monitoring and report generation. The new solution enables service providers to use a flow monitoring approach to get to the root cause of converged media issues. According to company sources, IT-911 boasts the ability to view data and VoIP flows to characterize congestion problems and isolate the problem sources. The solution can also generate comprehensive reports showing call quality and the state of the network, perform packet captures to perform advanced debugging, and load the network with up to 25 concurrent calls to periodically assess WAN performance with or without QOS parameters.

 

Jay Cuthrell, CTO of Digitel Corporation, noted in a statement that it has now become

imperative to do 24x7 monitoring of customer networks especially since they are now delivering real-time converged media services over networks that are constantly evolving. A majority of the SMB market is very price sensitive and thus a large number of SMBs do not yet value the importance of 24x7 monitoring.

 

Cuthrell said that when problems set in, these SMBs end up having to pay a lot of money in truck rolls and hourly wages of technician time to troubleshoot these problems. This lose-lose situation for both the SMB and the service provider needs to be avoided for growth to continue in the Managed Services space. Truck rolls now include a fuel surcharge fee that shifts the economics even further towards remote insight systems such as Packet Island’s products.

 

Per Bernie Leung, president of Mesatech expressed his company’s delight to have found such a useful tool, and plan to deploy IT-911 in all their new installations as an added feature for their customers.

 

Praveen Kumar (News - Alert), Packet Island CEO, said that IT-911 represents a breakthrough in managed service offerings for MSPs delivering converged media services – as their micro appliance is permanently deployed in the end customer’s network, it is there when needed, which means faster data analysis, and lightening-fast problem resolution for key customers.

 

IT-911 can be purchased either directly from Packet Island, or through Packet’s Island’s distributor, cyLogistics (News - Alert). The company has announced that from now until the end of August, any service provider purchasing at least four IT-911 remote monitoring boxes at a time will be given 10 percent off the initial yearly service fee for the first year.

 

Founded in 2004, Packet Island is a privately-held, venture-backed company located in Cupertino, California.