Case Study: Early Adoption Of Managed Services Sets Apart WAN Bound Technologies

Five years ago, when WAN Bound Technologies began offering managed services to its customers, the company intended only to remotely monitor and manage its UNIX-based, custom-made firewalls.

"We were selling a hardware firewall that we designed and checked manually," says Jurgen van Vliet, WANBound's chief executive. "From our experience, most companies' firewalls were not managed," he says. "Our value-add was to monitor and manage the firewalls we made and installed.

The managed services provider (MSP), centrally located in Woerden, The Netherlands, soon found it had to check in manually more frequently than planned, to stay on top of the firewall monitoring.

When clients wanted to add monitoring and management for their servers,"we realized it was too much for manual labor and custom scripts," says van Vliet. "We began looking for outside applications that would fit and be more cost-effective."

The MSP's search eventually led to N-able Technologies®, the global leader in remote monitoring and management (RMM) software. Currently, WANBound uses N-able's N-central® 7.0 platform for RMM as well as customization services. N-central features a unique hybrid freemium licensing model that lowers the overall costs of deploying RMM.

"For us, one of the biggest strengths of N-central 7.0 is the development kit," says van Vliet. "We have customers with exotic equipment that we have to monitor, and the software allows us to do that."