Ricoh IT wins "very large" accounts to new MSP solution

Ricoh IT is already onboarding major clients as an early local user of Kaseya's new infrastructure management solution, Traverse.

Kaseya added Traverse in its acquisition of Zyrion in July.

The system, which is delivered as SaaS, gives users a single view for managing and monitoring internal and external infrastructure, including cloud, on-premise, hybrid, virtualised and distributed environments.

Dermot McCann, Kaseya's ANZ managing director, explained: "Let’s say a customer is trying to manage an IP telephony environment but also desktops, data centres, servers, telco infrastructure as well as stuff stored at AWS or Azure; the Traverse monitoring application gives them a single pane of glass into all aspects of the environment."

According to Kaseya, Traverse maps business services to the underlying IT infrastructure components that support them, so that users can pinpoint which business services or groups are affected by network, server or application problems.

One of the early partners is Ricoh IT, which was established via last year's acquisition of IMC Communications.

Ricoh's IT operation had become an early partner of Zyrion Traverse soon after the IMC acquisition; coincidentally, parent company Ricoh was already global strategic partner of Kaseya – in fact Ricoh IT uses Kaseya to manages tens of thousands of end points Asia Pacific, North America and Europe, said McCann.

Off-the-shelf solution

Matt Dixon, head of IT services at Ricoh Australia, told CRN: "We started delivering managed network services in 2000, utilising open source frameworks.

"As we grew our customer base, we had a very mature service but the amount of work challenged those open source tools. Frankly, we got to the point we were breaking them."

After the acquisition by Ricoh, the ex-IMC team went out to market to find a better solution for infrastructure management and monitoring.

They were looking particularly at how quick the system could onboard new customers, especially those with new infrastructure or devices that the service provider hadn’t managed in the past, said Dixon.

They picked Traverse based on ease of use, scalability and price point, he added.

"We were finding people billing up to $50,000 in consulting rates to onboard a customer; what Traverse did was give us platform that significantly reduced those costs and provided a much more feature-rich platform. It is a nicely configurable and much more professional and easy-to-use system," said Dixon.

"We are implementing onsite for many very large customers in the thousands of devices."