Redstone: UK MSP Bets Managed Services on ManageEngine

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In recent years, Redstone has move far beyond bandwidth usage monitoring. These days, the MSP actually knows which applications are consuming the bandwidth — helping Redstone to scale its business while giving customers a portal view into the network.

“We began using ManageEngine for Netflow technology around 4 years ago,” recalls Laurence Dutton, a product manager at Redstone. The company started with Opmanager MSP before shifting to ManageEngine IT360. “We needed to provide an interface into our customers managed services, particularly around Managed Wide Area Networks ­ so that we could give our customers an insight into the status of their services and thereby show the value that we were providing,” said Dutton.

The net result: With ManageEngine at the foundation, Redstone has integrate a range of solutions — customers, open source tools, help desk services — into a comprehensive management environment.

While Redstone continues to grow its traditional ISP and managed services businesses, the company is also seeing cloud services growth — from IaaS to SaaS. Longer term, Redstone hopes to give customers more customizable dashboard — perhaps even a 3D view of a data center with clickable links to various services. Some of the work will likely involve iFrames and HTML — but ManageEngine’s monitoring software will once again be at the center of the solution.

ManageEngine: A Closer Look

Meanwhile, ManageEngine and parent ZOHO Corp. continue to reach deeper into the MSP and corporate IT market. More than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies run ManageEngine’s software. Plus, a SaaS division (Zoho) has caught on with small and midsize businesses that want alternatives to Office 365 and Google Apps. (Ironically, Zoho also is one of Google App’s top partners.)

Self-funded, ManageEngine has an interesting staffing model: Roughly 90 percent of ManageEngine’s staff focuses on software development, and roughly 40 percent of revenues are plowed back into R&D, while less than 20 percent involve sales and marketing.