By Dick Stark

RightStar has officially enter the Managed Service Provider (MSP) business, offering FootPrints in a managed service, or hosted model, rather than on the customer’s own premises. Why would a customer do this, rather than move to a SaaS offering like Remedyforce?

Since Remedyforce is BMC’s primary SaaS based service management solution, FootPrints is only offered from BMC in an on-premise version. Thus, for those customers inclined to cloud based solutions, and favoring FootPrints over Remedyforce, RightStar’s offering fills a gap that BMC cannot counter.  Additionally, due to the complexity of setting up a large Asset Core implementation requiring multiple servers and Linux expertise, a managed service offering makes sense.  The obvious question: is this a good value based upon the hosting charges compared to a similar on-premise implementation?

Because IT budgets are so tight, it is often only those projects with a well-documented ROI and hard dollar savings that get approved. An MSP approach offers immediate savings as illustrated below:

The comparison is between the first year cost of a new FootPrints on-Premise system versus a identical hosted system.  The savings are even more significant when considering the reduction in annual upgrade costs.  Of course, the on-premise cost will go down in subsequent years, but the yearly savings is still significant:

BMC also offers a term license for FootPrints customers that is paid annually. This would reduce the Year 1 cost in this example to $58,000 from $78,000.

How is RightStar able to pull this off?  Not by piggybacking on one of our servers in our HQ computer room, but by partnering with Rackspace, one of the world’s largest hosting providers. Rackspace maintains nine world-wide data centers, each of which is engineered with fully redundant connectivity, power and air conditioning to avoid any single point of failure. Rackspace guarantees 100% uptime, provides backup, disaster recovery options, virtualization management, and employs multiple levels of security.

RightStar’s mission is to return value back to our customers in terms of the investment they make in BSM products and services. Now, as an MSP, RightStar offers affordable and predictable costs with access to a deeper pool of FootPrints experts. The result: a rapid ROI and significant hard dollar savings.