SyAM Software Takes Manageability to the Next Level

Proactive system management from SyAM Software unleashes the power of Intel® vPro™ technology and Intel® Active Management Technology. The Intel® Solutions Summit helped launch their solutions into the small-to-medium business (SMB) and enterprise markets, building rapid success.

Who

SyAM Software develops proactive management technologies for both client and server systems that it tailors to the individual branding and localization needs of global system and IT appliance suppliers, managed service providers, and IT service and solution providers.

What

SyAM Software’s system management products include free downloadable local clients for laptops, workstations, and servers that interface with Desktop Monitor Central and Server Monitor Central, providing administrators with the ability to manage a large population of systems simultaneously.

Why

These solutions unlock the power of remote management for IT departments and service providers, enabling dramatic cost savings and increased efficiency.

Why Intel

Intel® Active Management Technology and Intel® vPro™ technology underlie the key functionalities of the software solutions from SyAM Software. The two companies have worked together closely to ensure that the hardware and software aspects of the solution work together optimally.

The System Manageability Dilemma and Opportunity

A major portion of many IT budgets is spent maintaining and supporting existing systems, leaving a small minority of resources available for innovation and growth. Budget constraints limit the abilities of many organizations to meet their strategic goals, causing many initiatives to be delayed. Common inefficiencies associated with system and network management include everyday support operations requiring technicians to make excessive desk-side visits, as well as asset management and license compliance being handled by outdated manual processes.

Tools available for managing multi-brand IT environments only provide reactive capabilities, dramatically limiting administrators' efficiency in managing those environments. Additionally, these tools are costly and complex to set up and use, poorly suiting them to the SMB marketplace, which faces the same complex IT problems as enterprises. These management inefficiencies, together with the downtime associated with system maintenance or upgrades, negatively impact the bottom line.

Automating help-desk support for operations such as password resets and common configuration tasks has enabled many IT organizations to cut costs significantly. Extending that automation to the next level, by enabling support organizations with extended remote-resolution tools, can further reduce the workload on support organizations. To be optimally successful, those tools must overcome three traditional obstacles that have existed with remote-management solutions:

• Offline machines. Since many maintenance operations take place during off-hours, it is inevitable that some client systems will be powered off, which typically interferes with overall administration tasks, forcing desk-side visits or interruption of the workday.

• End-user tampering. End users often intentionally or inadvertently interfere with the system configuration, thus affecting its operation and limiting or eliminating its ability to function correctly.

• Reactive problem-resolution mode. Excessive end-user calls to help desks raise administrative costs and cut productivity.

SyAM Software and Intel have teamed together to create a world-class solution consisting of both hardware and software components that deliver a complete means of addressing these issues globally in multiple languages. SyAM Software and Intel have been working closely at various levels on unified manageability solutions for Intel servers and desktops.

With SyAM Software’s ease of use, Intel platform support, scalability, and affordability, considerable opportunities exist for Intel Channel Partner Program members to deliver solutions to market that help their customers solve the issues associated with inefficiencies in system maintenance and support. From the provider's point of view, delivering complete solutions offers the potential to increase their margins by differentiating their offerings in the market segment and adding substantial value to their customers. From the end customer's point of view, initial investment in the means to decrease ongoing support costs can be a sound business choice.

Intel is including SyAM Software products with the Intel® vPro™ technology motherboards, and the companies are working together to drive these products into the market segment through Intel’s worldwide channel network of resellers, solution providers, managed service providers, and OEMs. Intel is committed to helping software partners like SyAM Software get their solutions to market through a variety of programs and events that help to ensure industry adoption.

SyAM Software Puts Intel Platform Technologies to Work

To address the need for proactive monitoring, alerting, and remote management of servers and client machines, SyAM Software developed a line of products that optimally take advantage of Intel platform technologies for these purposes. These tools provide both local and centralized management for 32- and 64-bit systems running both Windows* and Linux*:

• Server Monitor Local, Desktop Monitor Local, and Notebook Monitor Local - a single tool to manage all brands of servers, PCI RAID storage systems, desktops, and notebooks within an IT environment. This free product can be downloaded and installed to manage one system at a time.

• Server Monitor Central and Desktop Monitor Central - a single tool to manage all brands of servers, PCI RAID storage systems, desktops, and notebooks. This feature-rich product can be downloaded and installed in just minutes, to manage up to 500 systems simultaneously through a single console. License options scale from 1 to 500 systems.

Centralized monitoring based on SyAM Software solutions provides a comprehensive, standards-based set of monitoring, alerting, and management functions by means of a lightweight, browser-based client. A management console provides a single interface for all platforms and access to an in-depth hardware sensor, software applications/processes, RAID management, and the ability to remotely manage systems from graceful restarts and shutdowns. It also provides the capability to remotely control the keyboard, video, and mouse of a system from anywhere using a web browser.

Through the same interface, SyAM Software provides out-of-band manageability through Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT). These capabilities further enable remote resolution, even when systems are in a nonoperational state.

Asset monitoring down to the level of serial numbers of hardware and software versions, including software and hardware change tracking, is centralized and automated, with integrated reporting support via HTML, XML, or CSV formats. Management event logs capture performance and other operational data, which can feed planning and analysis operations, helping to match budgetary and strategic requirements with operational results. Using these solutions, administrators can keep up to date with the full scope of operations across the network, including being alerted to performance, security, and maintenance issues as they arise.

SyAM Software solutions dramatically enhance remote resolution and provide predictive failure analysis capabilities across the entire network. These capabilities are effective over multiple brands and models of server, desktop, and laptop hardware running both Windows and Linux operating systems. They also extend to storage resources, with integrated RAID management that allows you to keep track of physical and logical disk utilization, making changes as needed, with assistance from proactive monitoring and alerting resources. Reports on all systems are available on a real-time and historic basis from anywhere on the network, using a simple browser interface.

“Our partnership with Intel extends beyond product development to delivery of our products and support through Intel’s channel. Our relationship is continually expanding into new geographies, markets, and areas. Intel’s assistance was key in the introduction of strategic partnerships with Arrow Europe for Pan European Distribution and Lifeboat Distribution for North America Distribution. Our distribution partnership with Intel’s desktop division on vPro clearly shows our company's and technologies' ability for global solution enablement.” Nick Thickins CEO and Founder SyAM Software

SyAM Software solutions can scale from SMB environments to large enterprise infrastructures with existing management frameworks, enabling customers to rapidly take advantage of the SyAM Software product functionality and obtain better value from their hardware investment.

Through Intel’s program for software partners, SyAM Software received direct engineering support from Intel throughout the development of these products, helping to ensure that they achieve a high level of functional integration with the Intel platform features on which they depend. Another aspect of the joint engineering work involved in the development of these products was extensive tuning to ensure optimal performance. The solutions are specifically optimized for use with Intel® Centrino® mobile technology, Intel® vPro™ technology, and Intel® Dual-Core technology.

Intel Platform Technologies Provide the Solution's Foundation

Intel has adopted a platform approach that seeks to identify the key business needs and challenges faced by businesses, IT organizations, and end users. Those factors are the primary drivers for the creation of new technologies and features in Intel platforms. Intel has developed a number of discrete hardware technologies that it has incorporated into its processors, chipsets, and other building blocks, directly addressing those needs. To bring the full potential of these technologies to market, Intel engages in extensive enabling work with software, hardware, and service providers. These relationships help both to ensure smooth integration of the whole solution and to enable global marketing advantages.

One of the primary platform technologies developed by Intel under this philosophy of directly seeking out customer business needs is Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT). This set of hardware capabilities allows far more robust remote system manageability by means of a three-part 'discover, heal, and protect' methodology:

• Discover. Intel AMT allows administrative consoles to poll systems, even if they are powered down or have an inoperable operating system, to obtain hardware and software inventory information from each system’s nonvolatile memory.

• Heal. Proactive alerting notifies IT of a system problem, even when the system is down, allowing IT to respond by remotely rebooting the system to a diagnostic platform for problem resolution by either down-the-wire repair or efficiently dispatching a technician when needed.

• Protect. Through out-of-band communication, system software version numbers can be checked and, if necessary, system software and virus protection can be remotely updated with the most recent patches and virus definitions.

Another of these platform technologies, Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT), complements Intel AMT by providing a substantial hardware assist to virtualized environments on both client and server machines. This hardware technology simplifies and increases the robustness of software-only virtualization solutions, helping IT organizations create multiple independent, hardware-based environments within a single machine. Using this capability, IT organizations can create dedicated, tamper-resistant service partitions that can run administrative tasks transparently and beyond the control of end users.

Intel vPro technology incorporates Intel AMT and Intel VT for the business PC, together with enhanced security capabilities, such as the ability to isolate machines that have been infected with viruses from the rest of the network, helping to contain the threat and damage associated with security breaches. The combination of these technologies, which Intel has now incorporated into its mainstream platform offerings, offers the potential to cut costs by adding manageability while also enhancing security. Tremendous opportunity exists for integrators, OEMs, and MSPs to benefit by offering these capabilities to their customers.

Intel Solutions Summit Helps SyAM Hit the Ground Running

In March 2006, SyAM Software released version 3 of its products worldwide. That spring, the company participated in three separate Intel Solutions Summit events, located in Scottsdale, Arizona, Isle of Rhodes, Greece, and San Ya, China. By forging relationships through these events with fellow participants on three continents, SyAM drove its products to market and helped generate a projected US$2M in sales for 2006/2007. The relationships with Intel’s OEMs and Resellers that developed through these events have been invaluable to the success of the product release. Kevin Regan, SyAM Software vice president for North American sales, said "Intel was instrumental in introducing us to distribution partners, as well as Premier members. Without Intel’s partnership, it would have taken years and extensive resources to make this progress."

The Intel Solutions Summit is open to about 1,500 first-tier member companies, known as Intel® Channel Partner Program Premier members. The Premier members are the top performers of Intel’s global distribution network of more than 170,000 Intel Channel Partner Program members. Each of these companies is a reseller of Intel products, and the events provide an opportunity several times each year for those members to gather and learn about the latest Intel products and technologies and to network with each other. The large and growing member participation in these events provides unique matchmaking opportunities for software companies to showcase their solutions and develop business relationships with Premier members.

Relationships that Move the Industry Forward

SyAM Software’s close engineering work and co-marketing with Intel helped to drive solutions into the market segment. Intel Channel Partner Program members can incorporate SyAM Software into their product offerings, adding value to their hardware solutions, or enabling Premier members to perform managed services to their end users. This combination of technologies allows remotely managing sites, performing root-cause analysis of problems as they arise, as well as remote resolution of the problem, reducing travel costs and resource utilization.

"SyAM has been an active participant in Intel's program for software partners, which provides software vendors development tools and resources to enable applications on Intel technologies." Amy Barton Marketing Manager Intel Software and Solutions Group

For example, these capabilities can include taking full keyboard/video/mouse control of remote systems and guiding on-site users through trouble resolution, dramatically cutting the costs to resolve issues, as well as the mean time to repair. The solution can also be used to remotely power-down systems, which can provide cost savings in its own right, as well as assisting in network maintenance such as when powering down all client systems at a site to support a server operating-system upgrade. Moreover, the logging and reporting provided by the environment can help service providers to quantify operational activities to their customers, such as number of tickets resolved and mean time to repair.

Intel software partners like SyAM Software are finding worldwide opportunities to increase sales, add services, and access new market segments and revenue streams by marketing and selling to Intel Channel Partner Program members, to deliver complete solutions to their customers.

To find out more about SyAM Software solutions, visit www.partners.syamsoftware.com To learn more about Intel® vPro™ Technology, visit www.intel.com/vpro To learn more about the Intel® Software Partner Program, visit www.intel.com/partner To learn more about the Intel® Channel Partner Program, visit www.intel.com/go/alliancecenter