The new IT Essentials Toolkit, which handles virtualization, disk management and system optimization for servers and workstations, is a product many Paragon partners use themselves, but now it is also packaged in a SKU they can sell to their own customers.
Yudy Vinograd, Paragon’s Director of Channel Sales
Small business-focused backup and disaster recovery provider Paragon Software Group has announced its Hard Disk Manager (HDM) 15 IT Essentials Toolkit, a rebranding and repackaging of their utility software for easy management of servers and workstations. While the tool was previously sold to Paragon’s channel partners, this version is expressly designed to be sold by the partners to their customers as well.
“This is the type of technology every location, from small office/home office to enterprise, can use to be more effective in their daily management of systems, servers and lifecycle management,” said Yudy Vinograd, Paragon Software’s Director of Channel Sales.
HDM is the foundation product Paragon uses for standalone server and workstation backup and recovery, and also for lifecycle management. However, it also includes a plethora of utilities. It easily creates and executes an imaging and deployment process for Windows-based systems. It also makes it easy to move applications and operating systems to new hardware, allowing the migration of Windows systems from practically any source to any target, and streamlines processes for virtualizing a running system, copying existing virtual machines and adapting them for use with a different hypervisor. In addition, it has advanced partitioning and disk optimization features, and military-grade wiping algorithms.
“For instance, one company that remanufactures machines coming off leases uses this to wipe the disk clean, restore the original image, and reboot,” Vinovgrad said. “It is things that would otherwise have required multiple products, and it saves them about six minutes per machine. That matters when you do 40,000 machines a year.”
The earlier versions of this tool were packaged as a technician’s license.
“We had some end user customers using this before, but a lot of what keeps people from using technology that is available can be the way it is packaged and delivered,” Vinovgrad said. Paragon announced a new host-based Protect & Restore Unified Site License licensing option in April to simplify things for smaller customers, and Vinovgrad said that HDM 15 follows the same principle.
“The new licensing scheme makes things more self-explanatory, makes it easy,” he said. “Similarly, a ‘technician’s license’ is scary. An ‘IT Toolkit’ is easy. We realized these utilities were being used for a lot of daily tasks IT professionals are burdened with. The toolkit takes all this technology and repackaged it so it can be downloaded and placed on a flash drive. The customer can then plug it in and handle any of those everyday tasks they are burdened with.”
Paragon’s network of reseller partners are the exclusive distribution channel for the toolkit.
“While many partners purchase it for their own use, it’s also a resell product, so they can sell them to their customers,” Vinovgrad said. The SKUs are based on the number of users, with 1-25 seats starting at $USD 399, and 26 to 50, $USD 699.
