Zenith RMM Changes Name To Continuum, Adds BDR Solution

The Zenith RMM era is over.

The Warrendale, Pa.-based company has changed its name to Continuum less than three months after the business was spun out of Zenith Infotech and purchased by equity firm Summit Partners.

Michael George, CEO of Continuum, had hinted for some time that a name change was likely inevitable. The company likely is looking to distance itself from Zenith Infotech, its former owner now under scrutiny for Electronics defaulting on tens of millions of dollars in bonds.

"It's always been our intention of having a different name. At the time of acquisition, we literally got Zenith RMM as a placeholder," George said.

The new name was chosen because of its closeness to business continuity and continuous uptime, both facets of IT infrastructure that the company's solutions offer as it moves beyond the remote monitoring and management platform that Summit Partners originally purchased, George said.

"We're clearly part of a continuum. We're moving well beyond RMM. The name Zenith [wasn't] worthy of surviving our name change and RMM is just a part of what we do today. We're in much broader marketplace," George said.

As part of the Continuum change, the company also introduced Continuum Vault, a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) offering that offers end-to-end business continuity for a monthly fee.

Continuum engineers started working on a BDR solution almost immediately after the company became aware of Zenith Infotech's bond issues, said Steve Ricketts, vice president of marketing at Continuum.

The company solicited input from its RMM customers on how best to approach BDR and developed Continuum Vault in just a few months, Ricketts said.

"The must-haves [for Continuum Vault] were very clear from partner base. As you would expect, tight integration with RMM was abolsute imperative and support of the NOC. The other thing that was important was the full-end to end business continuity, onsite as well as offsite. Not just recovery but the ability to virtualize locally and in the cloud," Ricketts said. "Finally, applications support was critical and having different options for recovery, from bare metal recovery through a granular application recovery."

Jeff Neumann, Continuum Vault product director, added that quicker virtualization to physical migrations was necessary for partners.

"We heard horror stories of converting backups to virtual that would take six hours. We want to provide a solution that allows MSPs to virtualize in minutes or seconds and can show backups taking place with no corruption and if they need to recover a file or folder, they can do that quickly," Neumann said.

Continuum is not just shedding its Zenith legacy with the name change and new product, but it's going after Zenith Infotech customers -- as well as other MSPs too, George said.

Next: 2012 Initiatives

"We're going to be very aggressive across the full spectrum of the market. We can serve the BDR only market, but we think it's very powerful market to combine RMM with BDR. They are one," George said. "We were very deliberate in coming up with a solution not just for the replacement market for Zenith Infotech. We said if we want to be in this business, we want to be in to dominate it. We're looking well beyond the confines of their solution. We looked at broader market requirements and all the vendors of the market."

George has said the company would be run independent of Zenith Infotech and look to launch new products and partnerships with companies that compete with Zenith Infotech.

Continuum listed its 2012 intiatives, which include: -- Extended endpoint coverage for Mac OS, Linux, smartphones and tablets;

-- More comprehensive virtualization support;

-- Significant user experience improvements to the Continuum portal;

-- Third-party patch management;

-- Additional remote control improvements including ignition-style access from iOS mobile devices;

-- Improved voice clarity from the Mumbai, India, NOC due to upgraded telecommunications equipment between India and the United States.

-- Improved communications with NOC technicians resulting from specialized speech and language training; and

-- The launch of a hybrid service model combining the intelligent problem-resolution benefits of the Continuum NOC with the communications skills of its US-based help desk. Continuum plans a multi-city "tour" in the first quarter to bring more details to MSPs, according to the company.