Zyrion Looks To Boost Channel Profile Behind BSM Tools

Zyrion has continued to expand Traverse, its management platform, which in most cases is used to monitoring many data centers and groups of network devices well into the thousands. Zyrion has positioned Traverse as an alternative to IBM Tivoli, Novell, HP, BMC and other vendors with better-known business services management platforms.

"Our strength is very large environments," said Vikas Aggarwal, Zyrion's CEO, in a recent interview with CRN. "That usually means customers that have maybe 10,000 servers and routers and all kinds of devices. What we provide is really a service-oriented view of your IT infrastructure, and that resonates really well with the customer base. We've seen very good traction, especially as we scale the model to cloud."

Earlier this year, Zyrion expanded its Business Service Container Technology to extend Traverse capabilities to private- and public-cloud infrastructure. Several months ago, it also began offering Traverse as a subscription sale, through partners.

"Cloud and virtualization and hybrid environments are gaining acceleration," said Yogen Patel, Zyrion's vice president of marketing. "What that means is you need better managing of the infrastructure and a service-oriented monitoring product as opposed to traditional tools that focus on point monitoring of individual components. That can't be a box sale and can't be just a bunch of SKUs."

Zyrion lets partners resell its software, and it also provides Traverse to MSP partners to be included as part of a services portfolio. According to Patel, about 30 percent of its sales go through MSPs, with roughly 40 percent via enterprise solution providers and the rest in direct sales.

What's happening now is a channel expansion. Zyrion is actively pushing its channel program to resellers in the U.S. and Canada as well as other parts of the world, and marketing its subscription pricing model for Traverse as a way to give customers a different payment option if they don't have the capacity to foot a big bill, or if they have a smaller outlay and a subscription model would simply make more sense.

"It's better recurring revenue for partners," Aggarwal said. "It's also aligning to the way we see a lot of integrators selling right now."

The main "knob" in the subscription pricing, said Patel, is the number of IT components being monitored. Pricing for the low end packages starts at about $20,000 -- about 100 devices covered, and the full business services management dashboard, according to Zyrion. For very large deployments, the price can be up to $300,000 a year.

Zyrion actually began pushing the subscription service late last year, but only recently formalized its channel push and began to publicize it, hoping to attract new partners. According to Aggarwal, there's been increasing interest among regional and national VARs who are one step below global integrators but have the reach into midsize enterprise clients as well as larger accounts.

TRM Technologies, an Ottawa-based solution provider, is one partner seeing increasing opportunity with Zyrion Traverse.

According to Norman Carr, TRM's president, TRM actually discovered Traverse five years ago when looking for products that could provide secure, agentless monitoring. The intellectual property that became Traverse goes back many years before Zyrion's founding -- it became Zyrion's when Fidelia, the original developer, was acquired by Network General, which was in turn swallowed up by NetScout in 2007. Zyrion was spun off from NetScout later that year.

TRM recently deployed Traverse for the Canadian government, beating out a range of rival vendor solutions to win the business. According to Carr, the initial investment was about $25,000, but Canada expects to see a first-year return-on-investment of about $1.2 million, thanks in large part to dumping the point monitoring solutions -- and their licensing costs -- it no longer needs.

The ROI was a big part of the appeal for Canada, Carr said, but so was a collaboration benefit that was "a little more subtle."

"Government organizations tend to be very siloed, and trying to get collaboration and cooperation is not always easy among silos," he said. "In that case, you get issues in each house, each department, that are their responsibility and their job. That's a challenge with any big organization and you get into ticket-issuing and a lot of redundant tools and a lot of problems. So this is a big benefit of dealing with the networking issue: you can get cross-silo collaboration."

Tarr described Zyrion Traverse as ripe for discovery among solution providers.

"You really need to do your homework if you're going to find the diamond in the rough," he said. "There's so many people and so much noise in the market and everyone's got a story. It's not as bad as the car business, but not far from it. The big thing for us is we're a security firm, and this product is ideal for how secure it is, how it's easy to deploy and how customers can pick up the knowledge transfer proces in about two to three weeks. It's all very clean and very quick."