Remote monitoring and management (RMM) software provider, Pulseway, announced today the return of its free monitoring solution, Pulseway Free.
Freemium offers have generated hits and misses among MSPs (managed services providers) over the past decade. But Pulseway says its free offering was quite popular and got the company started in the early days. However, it hasn't been available since 2015.
“It’s a great day for me and the Pulseway team,” Marius Mihalec, CEO, tells ChannelE2E. “The fact that we’re able to return to the free offering we had when the company started gives me great satisfaction on a personal level.”
Rewinding to Pulseway's Early RMM
As Mihalec explains, he was in his bed in Dublin one cold and wet night in 2011 when he realized he had forgotten to turn off his computer. He figured there must be an app that could help him shut it down remotely. When he was unable to find one, the seed for Pulseway was born.
“I thought I’d build one, but build it better,” he says. “Not just with WiFi and stuff, but with the cloud. So no matter where you are with your phone in the world, you’ll still be able to access it and control all your systems.”
The solution grew from there thanks to some positive reviews and what Mihalec calls a huge amount of feedback. He explains that, from the beginning, the app included a button that allowed people to give feedback on the app. “So this remote monitoring solution has been designed by the IT administrators,” he says. “Because rather than us trying to come up with a hundred things that they find useful, we just asked them to tell us.”
A Victim Of Success?
From its unveiling in 2011 until its suspension, more than 300,000 accounts for the free offering were created. But free wasn't easy.
“We reached the point where we had to concentrate more on the commercial growth,” explains Mihalec. “To sustain 300,000 free accounts started to become quite painful. “If you can’t man it properly and reply to all the emails that are coming your way you have to drop it, It’s either provide a quality service or don’t provide it until you can figure out how to do it properly.”
Free RMM: The Encore
But now the free offering is back. That’s because Mihalec asserts, the solution has reached the point where it’s so streamlined the company is able to effectively deal with the new wave of free accounts being created.
This latest free iteration is mainly for personal use, according to Mihalec, but IT professionals are able to bring it into a professional environment and monitor up to two critical servers. The free offering joins the company’s other two monitoring solutions, the Professional level, which can monitor up to 50 endpoints; and the Team level, that can monitor from 25 to 100,000 servers.
Pulseway has made multiple MSP-centric moves across the RMM and PSA (professional services automation) space this year. The company has made some noise but faces intense competition in both the PSA and RMM sectors.
