Legato to bundle products and services

Storage software vendor Legato is bundling some of its storage management product suites with consultancy and services offerings, and adding additional suites.

Storage software vendor Legato is bundling some of its storage management product suites with consultancy and services offerings, and adding additional suites.

The new offerings are Automated Data Centre, Automated Branch Office and Automated Continuance of Data Centre, which are all rolling out immediately and will have associated consultancy and services. The new software suites will be placed with the existing products under the QuickStartz umbrella.

"We have put automation into everything, so that for end users we are cutting their costs because it will take less staff to manage it all," said Darren Gross, business partner manager for northern Europe at Legato.

He added that QuickStartz is a bundle of Legato software with consultancy included. "Resellers which maybe don't have the technical knowledge to give our products the consultancy and services side can now sell our products, knowing that the consultancy will be provided by us," he explained.

The bundles will be flexible, and accredited high-level resellers will be able to sell the software and consultancy in bundles which fit their customers' needs, Gross added.

The automated product suite is aimed mainly at the enterprise market and is not competing with lower-end products, said Thomas Madsen, vice president of business development for Europe, Middle East & Africa at Legato.

"It is not a standard NT tool out-of-a-box bundle. It is a bottled solution that enterprise companies can deploy to branches, offices and data centres," he said.

Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at researcher Enterprise Storage Group, said that enterprise companies are still looking for total storage management solutions.

"There is so much new technology being thrown at enterprise customers that many are throwing up their hands just when their storage management needs are skyrocketing. You have to present solutions that are well integrated and accompanied by the consulting and services required to support them," he said.