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Zenith Infotech hits bulls-eye with SAAZ
Infrastructure management is a $126 billion market globally
and has attracted a whole lot of players who are trying to get a piece of the
pie by providing remote management services for maintaining global networks.
But amidst all this action, one Indian company has been trying to follow a different
road by developing a product for this exploding market. Srikanth R P
reports
Predicting technology trends has never been easy. But the few companies who
have taken the call much before other companies have even thought about it obviously
hold the edge. One such trend that was emerging a few years ago was the ‘management
service provider (MSP) wave’. Today, the MSP concept needs no introduction
and is a billion dollar market with many Indian vendors providing remote management
services. But while most players saw a big market in services, Zenith Infotech
developed a product for this market. Today, the company is reaping the rewards
with more than 60 clients.
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Akash Saraf claims that SAAZ offers 90 percent of
the features offered by large players at one-fifth the cost |
Says Akash Saraf, joint MD, Zenith Infotech, “Before we started developing
the product (SAAZ), we realised that system management is equally critical for
medium enterprises and their dependence on IT is high. But unlike large enterprises
these companies did not have a product custom-built for them. This was an opportunity
wherein we could offer our network management product, which has almost 90 percent
of the features currently offered by large players at one-fifth the cost.”
Besides the cost advantage, the targeting of the product at mid-sized customers
has worked to the company’s advantage. Today the company has a total of
62 customers (33 in the domestic market and 29 in the international market),
which is a commendable figure for an Indian product company in a short span
of 10 months.
Zenith Infotech has been following a two-tier strategy for SAAZ. In India, the
company sells directly to corporates, while globally it has developed a network
of resellers to sell the product. But as the product is gaining market share
in India, the company is looking at exploiting opportunities by talking to large
system integrators.
While other vendors may have the experience, Saraf claims that his company’s
product architecture is leaner and more suited for today’s customers. To
illustrate his point, Saraf gives the example of SAAZ’s agent-less architecture.
Says he, “Most infrastructure management products need an agent installed
in the client machine to identify and monitor the particular PC on the network.
In a small network, installing an agent on a client machine is not difficult.
But think of a large network running into hundreds of PCs. Installing an agent
on to every desktop would be cumbersome. This is where our smart agents come
into play and monitor processes through event and activity logs. Smart agents
operate individually across different servers and report to a central data repository
that monitors and analyses the raw data.” This concept has also gone down
well with many players who are looking at remote management tools to monitor
and maintain their networks.
Conclusion
With many Indian companies looking to buy infrastructure management products
for maintaining their ever growing complex networks, Zenith Infotech clearly
has a great opportunity to widen the installed base. Another factor that could
work in Zenith Infotech’s favour is the ever growing number of Indian MSPs
looking to tap global markets for providing infrastructure management services.
Saraf too knows the importance of MSPs in growing the brand and is formulating
a plan to sign alliances with the major players. While the current period has
seen Zenith Infotech build up an impressive list of reference customers, Saraf
believes that the company will see huge growth in the next year as more and
more Indian MSPs seek global markets for providing infrastructure management
services.
srikanth@expresscomputeronline.com
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