It was March 2, 2012. It had been a long and stressful day - one of those days where it seemed impossible to keep up with the constant flow of support tickets coming in. We had just struggled through a firmware (FW) update for a Reseller Partner that had to be done for all of his customers, followed by another update to fix a security patch that was affecting numerous customers wireless access points. Unfortunately, that morning's first FW update also wiped out any port-forwarding in the customer routers in the field and locked us out from fixing new problems on storage units for (IP) cameras. It was beyond frustrating discovering this after believing we had finally fixed everything that morning. Now our partner would have to travel on-site, all the way to every customer-location to reconfigure things.

Sound familiar? Things like this unfortunately are part of the daily grind for Technology Partners (resellers, VARs, MSPs, etc.) everywhere. An one or two hour drive to fix a minor setting, reset a device, or make some device configuration adjustment is normal.

At lunch that day worrying about our reseller ordeal, I was thinking of a time when I was running a Reseller Business myself. Remote customers and bad traffic were horrible then too and I remembered vividly how 20 years back I wanted to build a solution for remote servicing customers. At that time the technology was not there and it dawned on me that the problems were the same but today we had the technology to resolve the problems. That's when I decided to talk to my CTO to build a solution to jointly revive my plans for a secure universal remote management platform based on modern secure cloud technology and enable all our Reseller customers to benefit from the concept.

Secure Remote Services like Monitoring, Configuring, and Management a swell as providing customers IT team and Managers access to View their Technology solutions would become ever more critical as today's business relies on technology. With more decentralized non PC devices, comes more inter-dependencies between systems. As more systems are added, resolution and management become increasingly complex. Having full visibility and access to a customer's infrastructure is more critical than ever. This day our team decided to start building IPTECHVIEW.

The question was, "How could we make it easier for our resellers to have full visibility of all IP technology products they sell. Hence, the name IPTechView.

We also wanted to find a way to provide secure remote management and configuration. Partners should be able to fully manage their projects remotely, cutting down on support time and cost.

The remote power of IPTECHVIEW would possibly even help may partners build a remote service unit and constitute a foundation for recurring income to their business".

So how could we provide the most value to our customers: Our Partners needed a reliable tool to monitor and manage all installed IP technology products and solutions while ensuring that all individual elements or devices installed continue working as expected. In IP technology, we also need to be positive that the overall quality of service (QoS) of the project is sufficient. With that in mind, we wanted to have a connectivity tool in case something was not working as expected. This enabled secure remote management, so a Partner could immediately service the customer without having to go on-site, saving time and money.

Finally, we asked ourselves, How could we help our customers not only save money but also generate more service income? How could we empower our Partners to monetize their own support to customers and what would be a level of support that would be best for their end-users?

We came to the conclusion that frequently there are indicators leading to technical issues. With this belief, many issues could be detected and resolved before they developed into outages - if the partners had knowledge about the circumstances. We decided that if we could come up with a solution to alert and predict certain problems, we could help reduce outages to a minimum level and help our resellers have very happy customers that would frequently refer them to other people for the very high service level they provided.

Our final goal was to help our resellers educate their own customers on the services they provide and on the high uptime they would have. In order to do this, we created a special customized outage and uptime report feature for our solutions and work-logs. This feature helps technology Partners educate their end-users on all the work they provide and help them bill for managed services.

Last but not least, we knew the best way to provide this platform to customers was as a hosted-software solution. That way, we could operate centrally and support Partners without them having to invest in the platform. But wow, what a task. This also seemed complicated and not realistic. We had thousands of resellers that sell hundreds of devices. How could we ever scale?

Then it dawned on us that we already had a foundation. Over the last several years we had already built out a platform to help ITSPs do NAT Traversal. There, we had gained experience in building out a robust and clustered - even international - platform that had grown to manage over 500,000 endpoints. If we could build on what we had learned and helped build-out for the Service Provider space, maybe IPTechView would no longer just be a pipe dream.

Fast forward four years, and we had a prototype! First, we targeted Routers, PBX. Then POE switches and phones. One more year and we went BETA with some our of our surveillance customers with our IP Video version of IPTechView, MX-MSP. Now, we are really ready to start deploying IPTechView as a solution for technology Partners everywhere so they can reduce their costs, offer better and increased services, and bring their recurring revenue to a whole new level.

Today, our partners truly can sit at a cafe and remotely survey all of their customers’ system health issues. They can intervene remotely and securely, while lowering their cost, offering incredible response-speed to any problem arising. They can also bill clients for work done on-the-fly.

SMALL AND MEDIUM BUSINESSES NEED TECHNOLOGY MORE THAN EVER BUT ACCESS TO QUALITY SUPPORT AND SERVICE KEEPS DECREASING. IT'S TIME TO FIX THIS!