15 Hot Technology Products For SMBs

Vendors showed off their latest and greatest products at CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange 2022 event in Dallas this week.

Dozens of vendors showcased their latest products and offerings in security, cloud, data center, MSP software and more at CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange 2022 conference in Dallas this week.

The products ranged from security information and event management systems from Blumira, smart print management offerings for education from Brother, network performance monitoring and troubleshooting from Auvik and UPSes from CyberPower.

Here are 15 of the coolest products showcased on the showroom floor at XChange 2022.

CyberPower

Shakopee, Minn.-based CyberPower makes home office and professional-grade UPSes, power distribution units, surge protectors, mobile chargers and more.

Its racks come enclosed or opened, with wall-mount enclosures available in addition to fans, air flow management, cable management and other hardware accessories.

The company, founded in 1997, sells through resellers with its Channel Partner Alliance partner program. Partners receive personalized dashboards, automated lead generation, live chatting, sales tool kits, a 5 percent instant partner rebate, and a 3 percent instant government and education rebate, according to the company.

Nuso

University City, Mo.-based Nuso offers business phone and cloud products with the goal of improving team communication, according to the company. Nuso is sold entirely through MSPs, resellers and other partners.

Partners can use a single sign-on management portal for quoting, ordering, provisioning, service management, reporting and support ticketing, according to the company. Nuso’s port order dashboard allows for automated porting and provisioning and shows scheduled ports and order status, among other metrics.

The Nuso marketing portal has training, co-branding and other marketing materials for partners. Its products—including unified communications, hosted VoIP, contact centers, text messaging and CRM integration—are aimed at SMBs and enterprises.

The company, founded in 2018, offers live trained technicians to work with partners, according to the company. It boasts a 22-second average wait time for partners, with 94 percent of calls answered in less than 60 seconds by a human.

Nerdio Manager for MSP

Chicago-based Nerdio offers MSPs a platform for multitenant Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 deployments, management and optimization.

The platform provides automatic provisioning in less than an hour and existing-deployment connection in minutes, according to the company.

Founded in 2016, Nerdio promises a single pane for administration without the need for an experienced Azure engineer, according to the company. Capabilities include per-user Azure cost reporting, wizard-driven cost estimates, best practices configuration, greenfield deployments, alert and notification management, role-based access control, image creation and management, and auto-healing.

Prices range from $12 per desktop user, per month for up to 250 users to $3 per desktop user, per month for at least 1,001 users, according to Nerdio. The company said it can save customers up to 75 percent on Azure compute and storage.

Brother Smart Print Management

Bridgewater, N.J.-based hardware and software company Brother has an array of educational offerings under its Smart Print Management Solutions portfolio.

Whether for higher education or K-12, Brother can assist in a school’s digital transformation through document management technology. Its printers, all-in-ones and scanners all offer triple-layer security features that can help ensure the security of certain documents, devices and networks, such as removing an icon from a user interface from selected devices to eliminate access to a feature.

Through cutting-edge technology, Brother also offers web-based features for students, teachers and administrators to connect, print and share data across platforms anytime, anywhere.

Lyve Mobile by Seagate

Lyve Mobile by Fremont, Calif.-based Seagate, an IT leader in data storage and management, allows users to move and activate mass data on their own terms.

Lyve Mobile is a high-capacity edge storage offering that enables enterprises to aggregate, store, move and activate their data. This eliminates network dependencies so data can be transferred at mass capacity in a fast, secure and efficient manner.

Applications within the devices offer temporary or permanent edge storage, large lift-and-shift data migration projects, storage, backup, archive, cloud and multi-cloud offerings and disaster recovery and redundancy transfer projects.

N-able DNS Filtering

N-able’s DNS filtering stops web threats earlier by providing greater network visibility and user-based reporting from within the N-able N-central dashboard.

The Burlington, Mass.-based Solarwinds MSP business spin-off focuses on security, management, monitoring and ticketing, with its newest offering using AI and machine learning to recognize and block malicious website in real time.

Partners can get DNS protection on a fast and reliable network, can easily and quickly manage customers from one dashboard, and can gain visibility into a site with off-network devices with detailed reporting.

CloudRadial Services Platform

CloudRadial is Dallas-based developer of an integrated platform for bringing services, account management and co-management to MSPs of all sizes.

Jeff Farris, president and CEO of CloudRadial, told CRN that his company’s platform addresses the fact that MSPs’ customers need tools as well as the education to use them, but those tools are less and less likely to require on-site visits from the MSPs.

“Five or six years ago, solution providers would go on-site to talk with clients,” Farris said. “However, today things are done remotely, including QBRs [quarterly business reviews] and formal meetings. The result is, clients are less and less familiar with what MSPs do and are more likely to get a huge report to read than a meeting with a partner.”

To mitigate issues, CloudRadial has developed a SaaS portal that pulls in information from customers’ PSA ticketing, as well as from the backups, assets, Office 365 and more, so that customers can at any time see what the MSP is doing for them, Farris said. The portal also creates actionable data that the MSP can use to craft action plans.

“We let MSPs stay ahead of clients and keep their clients informed,” he said. “Now if the MSP rolls out a new cybersecurity offering, for example, it keeps the clients engaged. And this helps with compliance because everything is documented.”

Prior to late last month, CloudRadial offered a single version of its platform targeting companies of any size. However, the company in late February introduced a new enterprise version aimed at MSPs working with customers in multisite environments, Farris said. The company also updated the platform’s security and dropped the a few features and the price to make it more affordable for smaller MSPs, he said.

Egnyte

Egnyte, the Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of a cloud content security, compliance and collaboration platform, used XChange to unveil its expanded focus on the architecture, engineering and construction industries.

Eric Anthony, Egnyte’s director of MSP community enablement, told CRN that architecture, engineering and construction industries face unique data-related issues that can hamper their business.

“Those firms have large files, including, for example, CAD files,” Anthony said. “There is a lot of collaboration going on between users. And job sites have poor internet.”

Egnyte enables those customers to have very fast back-and-forth data migration to and from the cloud, as well as the ability to store data on a local appliance at line speed while being centrally managed. It works with any hardware that runs VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, he said.

Next week, Egnyte will add the ability to view both 2-D and 3-D CAD files in the cloud without the need to download them, Anthony said. “Clients will also be able to search for text within the CAD drawings.”

Cristine Carrentero, channel marketing leader for Egnyte, told CRN that her company currently gets about 30 percent of its revenue via channels. However, Carrentero said, Egnyte wants to increase the amount of sales going through channel partners and is planning to introduce new packaged solutions available only through its partners.

For instance, she said one such package will likely have a new cloud file service with a price point at around half the previous one, along with support for partners to go downmarket. The company has also recently grown its team of dedicated engineers to give partners new support and collateral to grow their Egnyte sales.

Keepit

Copenhagen, Denmark-based Keepit used its first-ever visit to XChange to introduce its capabilities to solution providers, many of which may have been using the company’s technology without being aware of it.

Keepit’s SaaS-based data protection technology has been available for a few years via an OEM deal Keepit had with Veritas, said Chris Braden (left in photo), the company’s vice president of sales and channels.

“Veritas wanted to acquire us in 2020, but we said no,” Branden told CRN. “So Veritas in January bought HubStor.”

Keepit provides SaaS-based data protection for Microsoft environments, including cloud-native backup and recovery for SaaS environments such as Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and, starting last month, Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

The company’s offerings are based on blockchain technology, Braden said. “This makes the technology more cost-effective and secure,” he said. “As soon as data is backed up, it is immediately immutable to ransomware.”

Keepit is on-boarding about 500 customers that started working with it via the Veritas relationship, and along with that is expanding its channel and sales teams, Branden said. The company provides its own cloud in six Equinix data centers worldwide, and early this year opened a new data center in Canada. Latin America is next, he said.

New Blumira Editions

Blumira in April will roll out three entry-level versions of its security information and event management (SIEM) offering to boost its reach among cost-conscious customers, said Director of Partner Strategy Jeremy Young. The current version—which will become the top-level Blumira Advanced in April—starts at $7 per user, per month, while one entry-level version will be free and two others will be less expensive.

The Microsoft 365 free version of Blumira will offer one week of data retention and no security operations support, according to Young. One level up, the Microsoft 365 only edition of Blumira will provide retention for up to 30 days as well as around-the-clock security operations support, he said.

Customers using the Cloud Connectors version of Blumira will receive a year of log retention and around-the-clock security operations support and can support up to three of the following platforms: Duo, Microsoft 365, SentinelOne and Amazon Web Services. Blumira Advanced features virtual machines to grab system logs and firewall logs as well as more than 75 third-party integrations, he said.

Infima Phish Reporting And Monthly Reporting

Infima Cyber Security will enhance its security awareness training platform in April with the debut of a phish reporting feature as well as API-based monthly reporting, according to CEO Joel Cahill. Infima’s phish reporting will initially be focused on Office 365 and utilize Microsoft APIs for pulling in data and taking care of whitelisting needs without creating tons of support tickets for the MSP, Cahill said.

Infima’s API-based monthly reporting is modeled after Stripe and is intended for partners that want to plug and pull specific data around an individual user’s performance or behavior, according to Cahill. Enhanced reporting makes it easier for partners to demonstrate their value, call out risky users and improvements in performance, and document findings for compliance or cybersecurity insurance.

Infima’s reporting capabilities are today through a dashboard, and the shift to APIs will make it easier for partners to pull training performance or phishing performance data and put it into whatever format they want. The API-based reporting will benefit larger partners with more customers and users and can leverage the in-house engineers many MSPs have that are writing or connecting to APIs.

Inky Advanced Attachment Inspection

Many vendors today offer attachment scanning for keywords or content, but Inky’s upcoming advanced attachment inspection will stand apart from the pack thanks to its high efficacy rate and ability to scan code in just milliseconds, according to Alison Rusk, director of partner marketing. Adversaries will often hide executables in code and wait for just the right moment to detonate, making visibility so important.

Inky’s attachment service today rewrites links with attachments and does dynamic analysis to look for feeds with malicious code embedded in the links, said Sales Engineer Sandy Enow. But up until advanced attachment inspection, Inky hasn’t been able to remove, scan, isolate or monitor code, which Enow said is critical in attempting to thwart zero-day attacks given how easily things can change.

The company can now look for hidden code within attachments such as HTML code hidden behind images and is now able to monitor how the attachments or code change in real time, Enow said. In addition, other application scanning services allow the third-party firm to scan and keep the attachment in question, while Inky adheres to compliance regulations by not retaining a copy of the attachment.

The Compliancy Group's The Guard

The Compliancy Group was founded in 2005 by a group of former auditors who saw a gap in the market around security and compliance. Today, the company is working with MSPs to help businesses in the health-care space—or those serving the health-care industry—stay compliant with HIPAA.

The company is coming to the market with The Guard, HIPAA compliance software that gives partners what they need to achieve, illustrate and maintain compliance. The Compliancy Group is working on offerings to address Payment Card Industry and Canada‘s Protection of Personal Information Act with an offering for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation soon to follow, said Paul Redding, vice president of partner engagement and cybersecurity for Compliancy Group.

ConnectMeVoice VoIP Cloud Connect

Hosted VoIP specialist ConnectMeVoice is arming partners with every tool they need to address their SMB customers’ communication needs. VoIP Cloud Connect is a package of UC features that links a mobile app with web phones and softphones to traditional physical desk phones to enable a blend of working remotely, or from the home office or branch office.

The VoIP Cloud Connect app allows users to review voicemails, place outside phone calls and make and receive text messages using the company telephone number, make internal person-to-person video calls and text messages, call transferring to fellow employees, and making three-way calls, among other features.

The VoIP Cloud Connect phone app is compatible with iOS, Android and the Chrome browser.

Auvik Network Performance Monitoring

Eleven-year-old Auvik Networks specializes in cloud-based network management software. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company goes to market primarily through channel partners and right now is focused on helping MSPs gain visibility and control over their customers’ increasingly hybrid networks, said Steve Petryschuk, product strategy director for Auvik.

Auvik’s network performance monitoring and troubleshooting offering boils down network monitoring and troubleshooting to help partners keep users connected to business-critical resources as soon as it’s deployed. The offering also protects remote workers from VPN capacity issues.

Auvik in July secured a U.S. $250 million investment from private equity firm Great Hill Partners. The company said the investment is expected to accelerate product development, segment expansion and geographic reach.