ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

Times are tough. Small and medium businesses are watching the bottom line very closely and making cuts to ensure that they can make it though this difficult economic period. Network management systems have been one product area that corporations have found difficult to justify -- even in good times. In response to the current economic problems, one vendor has revamped its pricing structure.

SolarWinds has emerged a leading network management supplier by delivering simple and inexpensive products. The company’s ipMonitor enables businesses to determine which devices are attached to their networks and which ones may be experiencing connection problems. The product includes a Web interface and network maps, so network technicians have a clear view of their networks. The product features agent-less monitoring of applications, such as Microsoft’s Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL Server, using standard interfaces, such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

To entice companies to deploy its management system, SolarWinds is now offering offering flat rate pricing for its system. For $1,995, companies can use the tool to monitor any number of devices on their network. Typically, network management tools are priced by the number of devices they monitor. Consequently, the more devices managed, the higher the price, which made deploying network management systems untenable for many small and medium businesses.

With the nation’s economy in a tailspin, vendors are searching for new ways to pump up sales of their products. Items, such as flat rate pricing, may become more popular in the network management space. However, the vendors will be looking for other ways to recoup their revenue, so there may be a catch or two with such systems. While SolarWinds has made flat pricing available on its IPMonitor system, the pricing for its Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) still follows a typical usage pattern, at $2,475 for 100 monitored elements. So flat rate pricing seems to coming to select rather than all network management systems.