Nimsoft released its ecoMeter Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution in February this year based on CA’s own ecoMeter offering. Nimsoft provides IT management as a service and Software-as-a-Service and on-premise offerings for all IT management aspects.

It has utilized the CA ecoMeter technology to expand the solution’s use beyond the IT components into the facilities area by building the much needed bridge between IT and facilities to run data centers efficiently. 

Nimsoft DCIM can do the data collection, analytics, reporting and alerting on data from various data center facilities devices and other non-IT devices. The SaaS offering for CA ecoMeter technology enables customers to have DCIM as a managed service and MSPs to provide DCIM as a service. 

Nimsoft does this using probe-based approach – meaning a software probe with pre-defined templates for devices and calculations (such as PUE) will be deployed to a customer’s environment and the probe does the rest. The probe is built on CA ecoMeter gateway. 

We caught up with Chris Ross of CA and Yash Shah to find out more.

DCD FOCUS: What exactly are you offering?
Chris Ross: We have aggressively started to round out what will be a significant catalogue of services deployable by MSPs or directly from CA. CA Technologies made an acquisition with a company called WatchMouse that does cloud user experience monitoring as a natural extension. Customers want to monitor not just what they have as organic applications within their own four walls, but increasingly want to know they are giving consistent value no matter where or what their customers might be.

We also bought a service desk technology (now called Nimsoft Service Desk). That is the heart and soul of running a data center – it is monitoring feeds, it is where problems are solved tactically. Yash Shah was the founder of InteQ (a web-based help desk software).

InteQ now catalogues our products. ecoMeter effectively is the protocol, so now we can have a path with things like automation, scheduling technology and data management. This means Nimsoft is now a solution with a broad portfolio for MSPs to effectively do the function that most customers would normally do for themselves in terms of managing their data centers remotely offering an MSP platform.

DCD F: Where is the synergy with CA Technologies?
Ross: We have elements of synergy – there are some customers that for Service Desk want a simple solution but for monitoring they want the industrial strength of CA. But the intersection is pretty small today. In time it will get closer. Larger customers, I believe, will start exploiting cloud services as they start using MSPs more. They will then start to sound and act like a middle market customer.

DCD F: What kind of return on investment (ROI) are you actually measuring for your monitoring product?
Yash Shah:  For the data center guys the ROI is dramatic. If you look at the value of proactive marketing, it is more the question “if you don’t do it what is the impact?”

With DCIM and ecoMeter we are literally marrying the virtual world of computing to the physical world of power, and so on. The MSPs are very interested in that aspect. If you bring that data from power consumption and air recirculation and building management systems and marry that with your cloud data, it is pretty powerful. 

DCD F: How do you ensure you toolset is relevant to the marketplace?
Ross: We do hosting ourselves, so we offer the services we are describing as a SaaS-based services. We also use our own toolsets to effectively monitor our own offerings. We are working with partners that are better at certain things, such as managing and monitoring physical data centers because we are not a managed service provider.

We are using the Cloud to decide what is core to us and what is effectively done by another organization, and increasingly looking to MSPs to be the direct offering to customers… It is not just the software the customers want, they want the expertise that comes with it.

DCD F: What is your real sweet spot?
Ross: We can basically write what we call probes to support hardware in a very rapid way. There are always dependencies, whether it is physical hardware, SAP or Oracle. That is what makes this technology strong.

Shah: Nimsoft is essentially a software company. We can do a lot more things with the software than if it was just a pure physical world we can’t talk to.

DCD F: What is the growing importance of software to the data center?
Ross: [The data center] is going to become like a utility outlet. You don’t care how the power is generated or where it came from – you just basically do whatever you need to do with it. The important part is the service itself – that becomes the animal of IT.

This article first appeared in DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine, Issue 22. To sign up for FOCUS digital editions, click here.