In a move that disrupts the rapidly growing worldwide IT management market for emerging enterprises and departmental/line- of-business customers, CA Southern Africa has announced the availability of CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap – a free, feature-rich version of CA’s Technologies acclaimed CA Nimsoft Monitor solution.
CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap enables resource constrained customers to quickly achieve enterprise class visibility into the health of the diverse IT resources that support delivery of their business critical IT services.

Unlike existing freeware, freemiums, time limited trials, open source tools or mid-market commercial products, CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap:
* Can be up and running in as little as an hour, rather than requiring extensive setup and configuration;
* Provides robust performance and availability monitoring capabilities for network resources, physical and virtual servers, storage, databases and more in a single, fully-integrated solution – in marked contrast to other vendor offerings that require multiple products with varying levels of integration; and
* Is free for up to 30 monitored devices each with unlimited monitors – not a limited time-trial.

“Until today, under-resourced customers faced an unacceptable choice between non-integrated ‘point’ monitoring tools, technically challenging open-source code, and conventional enterprise-class technology that cost too much and took too long to implement,” says Andrea Lodolo, CTO of CA Southern Africa.
“With CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap, these customers finally have a solution that genuinely meets their specific needs.”

CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap addresses the needs of emerging enterprises – which lack the resources of their large corporate counterparts, but are no less dependent on the health of their IT environments.

It also gives large enterprise IT organizations and departmental IT service teams the unique opportunity to adopt next-generation management technology without cost or unnecessary risk – allowing them to more aggressively drive down operational costs and better safeguard service delivery as their IT environments become increasingly dynamic.

CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap provides:
* Dashboards, alarms and guided workflows to help users quickly pinpoint and resolve issues; and
* Built-in “tips and tricks” and best practices that flatten users’ learning curves and speed time-to-value.

“Historically, there has been a fairly significant disconnect between the low appetite of emerging enterprises for management overhead and the high cost/complexity of the tools they required to adequately safeguard their critical IT services,” says Jim Frey, VP, Research, EMA.
“CA Technologies is clearly attempting to address this market disconnect with both CA Nimsoft Monitor and its new introductory ‘Snap’ version.”

Reaction from beta testers of CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap has been positive.

“We evaluated SolarWinds and Spiceworks, but found CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap to be the fastest and easiest to download, install and configure,” says Deke Rhinehart, IT director/director Digital Media at The Zone Corporation. “That zero-headache implementation is of major value to a time-strapped IT department like ours.”

“CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap offers the perfect combination of rich functionality and extreme ease of deployment,” says Dawn Banks, IT support lead at College America. “It’s perfect for someone like me who has front-line responsibility for safeguarding IT service levels in a branch location.”

“CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap was quick to set up and even easier to use,” says Miles Freedman, director of IT at Lattice Engines. “Its significant usability and manageability advantages can help to improve our overall operational efficiency.”

The initial release of CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap supports English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. It is built on the same code base as CA Nimsoft Monitor release 7. CA Technologies plans to synchronise future releases of both products, which will continue to retain the same code base.

CA Technologies has created a community support site, CA Snap Central, that is open to everyone, including CA Nimsoft Monitor Snap customers. The site includes a community discussion board, free documentation, a knowledge base, instructional videos and a forum for sharing ideas for future releases.