Stonesoft brings management centre to midmarket

Security vendor Stonesoft says the launch of its Management Centre 5.0 this week allows midmarket resellers access to additional revenue streams previously reserved for the large channel players.
The main difference to this version of the software is that it offers a management console that can support multiple customer domains at one time. This allows Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) to separate different customer environments from each other. The administrator can have several domains open in different windows simultaneously, view their status and alerts and make configurations from the same domain. Customers can have access to and manage their own firewalls, but the MSSP controls the overall spectrum without fear of cross contamination, and the different customers seeing each others’ firewalls.
“It offers the midsized and smaller MSSP the ability to offer fully managed services without lots of different management centres,” explains Ash Patel, country manager UK & Ireland at Stonesoft. “The only people that could really afford to do this before were large players buying Checkpoint for a six-figure sum.
“From a revenue perspective, it allows them to charge customers independently for managing their own firewalls without making a quarter of a million pound investment – they can justify the expense at affordable level.”
The Management Centre costs 10,000 Euros, and Patel reckons resellers can get an almost instant ROI through a combination of charging a regular monthly fee for nominal management of their customers’ firewalls, then for extra for wraparound services such as reporting or changing policies – at no extra investment on the reseller’s part. The system can also monitor third party devices such as routers, which it can also report on.
The vendor athlso says that resellers only pay for the number of customers they sign up.