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General Manager and VP of Global Sales at Netformx
More about Mark Bickerstaffe
We listened and delivered MSP Network Risk Assessment & Maintenance Tool
Since Netformx became a developer of software solutions for Cisco Partners, 25 years ago, we have always focused on the needs of the partners and worked to fill in the automation gaps in their Cisco business workflow.
One of the reasons I joined Netformx in 2017 was it was immediately clear the company listened and cared passionately about what success looked like for its clients. This encouraged customers to openly share their needs knowing full well Netformx will adapt.
Enterprise’s across all industries, large, medium, and small all want to focus on their core business. They need and want Solutions, not distractions from executing on critical strategies and visions. This reality has led many Integrators and IT Providers (Netformx customers) to evolve their managed services business.
As trusted advisors we were part of hundreds of conversations and observed these trends listening as always for automation gaps. This is what we do!
What partners said
- We want to be able to perform scalable and repeatable network discoveries to understand what Network devices are actually out there. Give us a better mouse trap, so we move away from guessing or estimating and manual error prone Q&A and spreadsheet kung fu.
- We want someone to enrich the data we find and tell us as much as possible about the found network devices.
- We want to see a physical and logical map
- We want to know what vulnerabilities are in the network. Tell us about End-of-Life issues and known threats
- We want to know what do to about these findings
- We want to be transparent with our customers and engage them in the process with Customer Portals branded with our name.
What we did
With this in mind we set out on a mission to evolve our AssetXpert platform for ongoing MSP assessments and vulnerability identification. We integrated, into AssetXpert, our proven and massively used remote discovery technology which now presents information via a dashboard experience.
AssetXpert already provided a dashboard for asset inventory of Cisco’s SmartNet contracts and Subscriptions so by adding our discovery capabilities for network devices, we were able to pull in the device information as well. We added the option to automate the assessment upload through a discovery or to upload a customer provided inventory based on end-customers preference.
Additionally, AssetXpert already had portals for end customers to view their assets up for renewal, and now they can also get a view of their network.
Working closely with several development partners we were able to ensure the solution delivered on their needs.
What this means
We are excited about what the significantly upgraded MSP Network Risk Assessment Tool – AssetXpert can deliver for your managed services operations team to not only assess the network devices, but to allow you to identify vulnerabilities before they become a problem and benefit from predictive maintenance with our AI machine reasoning engine.
What this means is a simplified way to be proactive and build resilience into your end customers network to keep it fresh and secure.
We would love to share this with you or your MSP team. Please reach out to me at mark.bickerstaffe@netformx.com to hear more.