By Boo Van Alstyne, vice president of products and services, Ubersmith
Increasingly, data center managers are being asked to bill out – or chargeback – to business units for services provided. This sort of subscription billing is not trivial. Consider, too, that data center managers are responsible for overall management of the infrastructure, which includes having an inventory of all components and software, as well as tracking and responding to all help requests from users. All of this tracking and reporting can be overwhelming.
More than a decade ago, the Ubersmith software was developed as an in-house billing, help desk and data center monitoring tool for a hosting provider. Since then, it has expanded into an independent company supplying software for data centers and cloud-related service providers. With its release of version 4.0, Ubersmith delivers new features for integrated subscription billing, services pricing, infrastructure management and help desk ticketing, along with an upgraded user interface.
The modular design of the business management software suite enables customers to use the full complement of features, or select only the modules they need, or choose specific modules to be used in combination with systems already in place. Pricing is based on the number of users, clients and devices – giving customers the ability to pay only for what they need.
New Features
Ubersmith 4.0 has a new user interface that is clean and simple for navigation which has been tuned to users’ needs. Additional new features include:
– Global event notifications that enable administrative users to subscribe to specific account alerts that are important to them and provide automatic updates, including status on quotes, support tickets, devices, work orders and more;
– Responsive graphs that are refreshed on an ongoing basis to reflect the most current data with “drill-down” capability for analysis;
– Pricing history audit trail with information on anything that may have affected a change, such as rate plans, contract terms, discounts, quantities;
– Scheduling of pricing for future points in time.
A full list of the product capabilities can be found at www.ubersmith.com/product.
One user, Shawn Mills, president of Green House Data, said, “The sophisticated pricing and forecasting capabilities help us better serve our customers. Because we offer a high degree of customization, Ubersmith’s holistic views and specific alerts are invaluable to our business.”
Ubersmith is the premier business management software for data centers and the cloud. The billing and management platform appeals to large enterprises, as well as small enterprises because of its extensibility, modular pricing that is flexible, plus a reputation for outstanding customer service.
Philbert Shih, managing director of Structure Research, says, “As the need to maximize operational efficiency is increasingly top of mind, it is no coincidence Ubersmith continues to gain adoption.”
Pricing and Availability
Ubersmith’s “pay-as-you-grow” model starts with a monthly subscription license of $500 and is based on the volume of users, clients and devices. Standard support is included, plus a premium enterprise priority support is available, along with consulting, training and development services. Ubersmith offers special pricing to qualified startups and small companies starting at $250 per month.
About the Product
Ubersmith’s software suite includes subscription billing, infrastructure management, help desk ticketing, sales quoting and order management capabilities.
The software suite is platform-independent and integrates with merchant providers, electronic payment processing providers, SureTax, QuickBooks, domain registrars and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) providers. In addition, Ubersmith offers integrations with cloud, virtualization, backup and other technologies and applications, including Citrix, cPanel, OnApp, Parallels and R1Soft.
