When Your Services Need Service
By Bill Pitzer
If you're an ASP or ISP, your business is built around selling service plans to customers. These plans include many different features that make them unique and more targeted toward various segments of your intended customer base. If you're a newly formed service provider, your technical offerings are probably still somewhat limited. A small set of options is easily managed. However, as you begin to grow, more and more offerings are likely to be thrown into the mix. What originally seemed like a breeze to control can turn into an unmanageable monster. You want to offer customers the most flexibility and biggest mix, but keep an eye on how these factors will impact your limited resources.
Being a service provider isn't an easy job. Not only do you have to maintain your current client sites, but you must juggle many other operational duties. This includes everything from purchasing, plan creation, and provisioning, to billing your clients. Unfortunately, these tasks often involve interaction with many different systems. This is where service and application management software come into the picture. Designed to handle all operational duties a service provider encounters, it lets you concentrate on the most important task of building your business. Used successfully in Professo, LLC's own data center, AppStreamer is now available to other service providers who wish to simplify these time-consuming duties.
AppStreamer is currently supported on the Linux and Solaris 2.5.1 (or later) platforms. At press time, support for Windows NT was slated for first quarter 2001.
