KEMP Takes Aim At F5 By Improving Application Experience, Debuting New Partner Resources

KEMP Technologies is arming its partners to go after application experience opportunities, the company told CRN.

KEMP, an application delivery company, has bolstered its load balancing and application delivery controller (ADC) software with more automation and predictive analytics. The enhanced features will improve application experience for enterprises, said Tony Thompson, chief marketing officer for KEMP.

Alongside the product updates, KEMP, a company that does more than 95 percent of its business through the channel, is giving its partners more flexible licensing options and deployment and management capabilities to boost application delivery sales for businesses with premise-based, cloud, hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud infrastructures.

"We've been focusing on weaponizing our products through the channel so they can address all the objections they usually get," Thompson said. "For Example, a partner can drop in KEMP 360 Central and look at the customer's F5 ecosystem and generate reports on utilization."

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The Bethpage, New York-based company on Wednesday unveiled Enhancements to KEMP 360 Central, its centralized management platform that provides analytics across multi-vendor load balancers, including AWS and F5, and KEMP 360 Vision, an offering that provides predictive analytics and automated remediation.

KEMP 360 Central now has direct integration capabilities with cloud and hypervisor platforms, so customers or partners can spin up new load balancer instances inside VMware, for example, Thompson

Said.

"The point is, simplifying the process of the stand-up of new services and helping customers deliver positive application experiences," he said.

KEMP 360 Vison has been extended to support more security use cases, such as monitoring, as well as third-party security products.

On the channel side, KEMP is extending its technology partner integrations to include advanced tier status with VMware on AWS, Select status with Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), and advanced tier relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

KEMP is also giving its channel access to more sales, marketing and training tools to grow their load balancing and ADC businesses via new resale and distribution partnerships with the likes of CDW, Immix Group, Ingram Micro, and SHI, to name a few. "Ultimately, it's those experiences with applications that will influence whether or not a partner's customers stay customers," he added. "We are focused on new ways for our partners can create value."

KEMP's latest offerings are consumed based on metered licensing, a scalable way to pay on a month-by-month basis based on usage.

"That's really a game changer because [partners and service providers] no longer have to build the infrasturure up and hope they come, and businesses no longer have licensing costs based on what they think might happen 9-18 months down the line," Thompson said.