Lanamark Virtualization Services Software

Mark Angelo, CEO and founder of Lanamark,spoke a while ago about the challenges virtualization technology can pose for providers of IT services. This folks are often known by a number of different names including channel partners, service providers and the like. Virtualization technology, in Mark's view, offers these people a number of opportunities, but a new set of skills and a new set of tools will be needed in order to fully exploit those opportunities.

What Lanamark is offering

Here's how Lanamark describes Lanamark Suite:

Lanamark Suite consists of software applications for discovering, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing heterogeneous IT infrastructure. It allows Lanamark channel partners to deliver virtualization services quickly and consistently across multiple hypervisors, protect customer data captured for analysis and differentiate their offerings by providing customers with unique, sophisticated and unbiased service deliverables.

To maximize the speed, quality and consistency of services, providers can define service templates called Accelerators. These Accelerators allow channel partners to specify a policy for identifying application workloads and server resources to be assessed, select inventory and performance metrics to be collected, design reports and server templates to be used and specify analysis, planning and design modules to be activated in the Lanamark Studio

Components of Lanamark Suite

Here's how Lanamark describes the components of their new product:

Lanamark Portal – for managing customer accounts, engagements and assessments online. Using the Lanamark Portal, service providers can also administer teams of consultants and acquire individual licenses for workload analysis in Lanamark Studio.

Lanamark Explorer – for truly agent-less collection of inventory and performance data about application workloads and server resources. Lanamark Explorer is a light-weight and easy-to-install application that does not require licenses upfront. The data it captures is stored in a secure snapshot that can only be unlocked by the service provider performing the assessment.

Lanamark Studio – for rich analysis and reporting on application workloads and server resources. Using templates, consultants can identify virtualization candidates and automatically publish powerful charts and reports that map directly onto assessment deliverables, consistently across engagements.

Snapshot Analysis

While it appears that Lanamark has developed a product that would be helpful to folks delivering IT services to end customers rather than doing software development or delivering software solutions, it seems that others have been offering this type of technology for quite some time. This means, of course, that Lanamark faces a number of challenges if it hopes to win in this market.

If the target audience has already selected tools from VMware, Parallels and the like, they're not likely to be interested in Lanamark's products.

If members of the target audience have not yet selected tools to help them deploy virtualization-based solutions for their customers, it will be difficult for them to find Lanamark when other, much larger, suppliers are doing their best to get the ear of the decision maker.

The product itself seems well thought out and easy to use and customize. It appears to support quite a number of virtualization technology products now and the company appears ready to add support for other products to meet customer requirements.

Will Lanamak become a well-known brand in this area? That's not yet clear. If your organization provides IT services to others, it would be worth looking into what Lanamark is doing.