Lanamark offers new tool for channel 2 September, 2008 By Paul Weinberg

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This is where startup Lanamark comes in which is targeting all sizes of organizations with a new software product suite that is being introduced this fall.

"One of the challenges that end users have is that there is a shortage of virtualization professionals in the field. They are reaching more and more to solution providers, to help them assess their existing infrastructure," stated company chief executive office Mark Angelo.

The Lanamark suite contains three components -- the portal to serve as a hosted web management console, the explorer which collects data on the client's IT infrastructure and the studio for the final analysis.

Lanamark is making the product is available for free to the channel partners.

In turn, the end organization also can access the explorer for no charge to get a snap shot its' systems. Where the partner and Lanamark generate their money is on the licensing of the Lanamark studio for the analysis of the collected data, explained Angelo

"The only way to capture the market share in the virtualization space is to go through the channel. And in order for those channel partners to be successful, you need to give them two things. One is a good virtualization product and secondly a services tool that enables them to deliver it most effectively to customers."

Angelo is a former product line manager at Platespin for a virtualization capacity planning tool which is sold directly to enterprises customers. He left about a year and a half ago after Platespin did not take up his proposal to develop a version for channel partners, including VARs, integrators and consultants. The feedback that Angelo received was that the same enterprise product could also be sold to the channel without any further tweaking.

"There was no point [he was told] to keep enhancing for that [channel] segment."

Since Angelo's departure Platespin has been sold to Novell where the smaller company is being completely absorbed into the larger entity.

The Lanamark suite is vendor neutral and will work with any virtualization software product including VMware, Microsoft, Citrix or Virtual Iron, Angelo explained.

"One of the advantages that we have with being independent is that we can offer solution providers a solution they need that is unbiased and gives [clients] more options."

Also, the data collection can be done remotely by the channel partner for the client, Angelo continued.

"You really want to help the customer understand what their data center looks like today. How it is utilized and what their data center can look like."

John Sloan, a senior research analyst at the Info-Tech Research Group observed generally that a market exists in the channel for packages containing capacity planning tools, training and support as new powerful servers embedded with a hypervisor are introduced and purchased.

Many smaller businesses which do not own a lot of servers are often focused on business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery as their main rationale for virtualization, Sloan stated

These tools can help clients understand what is the appropriate time to buy more physical servers within a virtualized environment and how to integrate a storage area network into the mix, Sloan explained.

"From the client's side it is easy to get a server that has a hypervisor on it, and to launch virtual machines. That is relatively easy for a project. But to move to where you are going to use it as a part of your backbone of your production servers requires a bit more sophistication in terms of managing, with that lost art of capacity planning."