MSP Offerings: Zenith Infotech in more detail

I signed up for Zenith's trial over a month ago, and only had a few hours to play with it before running out of research time. My life is pretty tightly scheduled so I had to shelve my MSP demo for almost a month.

I'm back to it now, but my trial expired. No big deal. Zenith is dirt cheap to use. Check these prices:

http://www.saaztraining.com/zenith deliverables 2007.pdf

So I just signed up and am now paying a few bucks a month to continue to try out Zenith. I'm also now seeing Zenith from the side of a "real user", not a "prospective user" so I should be seeing the true system, not the salesman-enhanced side of things.

I like the fact that I'm not pressured to buy anything big upfront. It's all SAAS, so there is next to no requirement on my end, other than using IE (Firefox doesn't work) for their management console.

True, with SAAS you're always paying for it. But remember; software is always evolving. I have a few products I can keep running for a few years without upgrading, but not too many. Usually you're always in need of the new features or the bug fixes, or the new platform support that the new version brings.

I'm starting to become very aware of the internal costs we pay for maintaining our our software - The time we spend frigging with our servers, setting them up, maintaining them, etc. That time is far more productive being spent on customer's needs, which can be billed. Part of me is a bit apprehensive about the lack of control, but most of me is happy that I don't have to deal with putting it all back together if it crashes.

So what do I like so far about Zenith?

Well, I like the reports - Very similar to what I generate for my clients, except it's all there. I can output nearly the same thing with 5 clicks, and I'm done. This task is simple enough that it can now be given to the admin staff, not needing a technician to build the reports.

The dashboard/overview of what is going on with my servers is rather simple, but you know, it tells me the main points I need. I'm sure this is customizable, I'm still in the process of figuring that out.




I will keep learning this package and then write a better report on it soon. Once that's done, I'm off to check out Kaseya, Bigfix, and probably Level in the same detail. It's going to be a lot of time, but this is a big decision. These are complex packages, and they need proper attention to compare.