Kemp extends the automation it provided previously, including adding the ability to provide alerts about other part of the stack than their vADCs.
The new Kemp logo
New York City-based Kemp is making a series of announcements today designed to enhance both its capabilities to manage beyond load balancing and application delivery controller [ADC] software, and to impress those capabilities on the market. The latter involves both marketing and rebranding initiatives, as well as expanding its partner ecosystem with a deeper dive into the MSP space.
“What is critically important for this refresh is that we are expanding beyond the narrow scope of load balancers and application delivery controllers,” said Peter Melerud, Kemp’s co-founder and chief strategy officer. “We have expanded our automation and predictive analytics to go well beyond the classic functionality of load balancer and ADCs. We are also telling the market that we are no longer simply about being a disruptive ADC player, but are moving into a new construct around the application experience.”
The enhanced automation capabilities, and Kemp’s consumption model for purchases, which has been around for about two years, but which they have been emphasizing more recently, are key aspects of this application experience. The latter gives more choice to customers who prefer this option over a monthly subscription, or perpetual licensing.
“That’s what the kind of partners that we are talking with now do – make sure that customers have best possible experience,” Melerud said. “But a lot more can be done beyond vADC. It’s also about creating an ecosystem of solution providers that will enhance experiences. And it’s about a refreshed logo and narrative of who Kemp is.”
The product enhancement here is, however, a critical part of the equation.
“That’s where the rubber meets the road, with the product,” Melerud indicated. “A critical new element in our Kemp360 application delivery fabric is that from the central console, you can now automate the provisioning, including configuration of your LoadMaster instances, across all clouds. To ensure you have all your ducks in a row in the cloud, you need the ADC to have the exact same configuration in the cloud. We enable you to do that with a prescribed workload. You literally just have to press ‘Go’ and like magic, an ADC instance shows up in the cloud preconfigured for the kind of workload you want. You can control who goes where in terms of users, without the end user knowing or feeling that anything has changed. We do all this through a single pane of glass to monitor. That no one does today.”
Kemp previously offered some of this functionality before, but Melerud said it has been significantly enhanced with this release.
“We did have an automation piece before, but you did have to manually pre-provision a part of the instance with things like IP addresses and gateway routes,” he indicated. “You now tell it what it needs to know, and then you can remotely manage the configuration and do all that initial provisioning in an automated way. In addition, while in the past, we just did the scope of the ADC itself, we can now look outside of the Kemp construct into changes that are happening in your stack, and now give you pre-emptive alerts about something that may go wrong. It’s not just about the ADC. It could be on your router, server or storage environment. We can see the traffic, project traffic flows and see how if you will run out of capacity on VMs – with a button to get to Kemp tech support. In the past, this would have been done as a post-mortem.”
Kemp based these changes on partners’ feedback, and will be expanding its partner ecosystem with the new initiatives.
“These ideas came from partners who have a significant service provider element to their business, and who do cloud migration for customers and manage multi cloud environments,” Melerud said. “We worked closely with those partners. We see interest expanding to small niche partners who are MSPs who are taking over the management of clients’ cloud apps, something that bigger providers and hosters are doing. They need something in their stack to enable them to control and accelerate these things without having to build it out themselves from hardware. This is direct feedback from partners.”
