ManageEngine Links MSP Center Plus to Zoho Reports

ManageEngine, the IT management software provider and a division of Zoho Corp.,  has added Zoho Reports support to MSP Center Plus, a multi-tenant management environment for managed service providers. The software provider’s goal is to give MSPs a solution to create more comprehensive network environment reports and pull more detailed analytics to improve their network performance.

A few days before ManageEngine released the upgrade, I caught up with Zoho Corp. President Raj Sabhlok to learn the specifics of how ManageEngine’s roughly 50,000 end-users will benefit from the Zoho Report integration.

“Both MSPs and their organizations are starting to deal with a huge amount of data, and they’re struggling to make sense of that data and get their arms around,” Sabhlok said. “This is our entry into answering the big data issue that they’re facing.”

Sabhlok said that many IT administrators don’t have the time to create reports and capture data. There’s too much on their plate and many don’t have a reporting tool. “Some administrators are using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to aggregate pieces of data and make a report,” Sabhlok explained. “But that takes several hours per week.”

So ManageEngine is trying to do two things with its MSP Center Plus Upgrade: churn out more detailed reports, and save MSPs the several hours per week they’re currently spending just setting up reports. The MSP Center Plus will now automatically push an MSP’s data into Zoho Reports, which is a cloud-based data capturing solution. Zoho Reports then churns out reports that Sabhlok says are easy to pull analysis from. That analysis can then be published into dashboards for customers.

“The goal is to get the hidden nuggets within the data and then report on that,” said Sabhlok, who noted that the upgrade is not only for MSP en-users; it’s also for MSPs themselves. Zoho Reports can be used both internally and externally. Now that MSPs will have their data in an analytics tool, they can use the data to evaluate and assess their own businesses.

“Because of the amount of applications ManageEngine has to offer, and because of the various components of a network we monitor, ManageEngine is well positioned to help make sense of all the data MSPs and others are currently dealing with,” Sabhlok said. “We think more MSPs will be looking for this type of solution. Their customers want to to know what type of service they’re getting, and this solution lets them do that.”

ManageEngine’s latest move is another step toward fully integrating all of its IT solution — something the company began in December 2011 when it integrated its Desktop Central and ServiceDesk Plus solutions. We’ll be hearing a lot more from ManageEngine has the company announces a slew of product announcements at Cisco Live London 2012.