Cool Emerging Vendors From A To Z: Zyrion

Channelweb.com in January launched its Emerging Vendors blog and has since profiled some 200 fresh young vendors that are eager to work with channel partners. Here's an A to Z look at some of the coolest companies we spotlighted this year, wrapping up with ... Z is for Zyrion.

Company: Zyrion

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Zyrion Traverse

Year Founded: 2007

Number of Channel Partners: Fewer than 10 in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Zyrion provides a business service management offering that helps enterprises increase visibility and control over their IT infrastructure, improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and maximize revenue opportunities.

The Lowdown: It's one thing to notify a customer when a server goes down, but it's another to let the customer know what business services went down as a result of the failure. That's what Zyrion, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, hopes to offer to midsize and large companies.

Zyrion Traverse

"In today's environment, with distributed computing, when a piece of the network goes down, we can tell you which business service is impacted," said Vikas Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Zyrion. "Now when two things go down, you can make a determination of which one is more important. Historically, customers fixed what went down first, even if it wasn't the most important. Now the mean time to recover critical functions decreases a lot. That's a direct cost savings to the business."

Zyrion is looking to stake its claim in the business service management space, against competitors like IBM Tivoli and BMC. Pricing for Zyrion Traverse starts at $50,000 with an average selling price is about $100,000, according to Aggarwal.

The company is recruiting VARs to help sell its product line, but it will only take on a few VARs that it can work closely with, said Aggarwal.

"This is not something you sell off the shelf. It's a solution sale and it's not a cheap product. We have to make sure the VARs we work with we can supply adequately," Aggarwal said.

Zyrion has some legacy direct customers, but Aggarwal hopes to pass on all new leads to the channel.

"Historically, from what I've seen, it's rather impossible to be a mixed model. You're either direct or with channel," he said. "We're going to pass everything through the channel," he said.