Zenith Infotech Spins Off RMM Business Into New Company

In addition, the new Zenith RMM has received a "sizable growth equity investment" from investment firm Summit Partners and has hired Michael George as CEO.

Meanwhile, the ongoing Zenith Infotech business will include its MirrorCloud Business Continuity and SmartStyle private cloud solutions, said Akash Saraf, CEO of Zenith Infotech.

The impetus behind the split is to allow both sides to make necessary investments and grow the respective businesses, Saraf said.

"We have a pretty broad product line for the MSP market, with our own NOC, BDR and continuity and cloud solutions. We needed a broader management team and the ability to put more investments into the business," Saraf said. "The primary motivation behind this is more management bench strength. The second goal is to get a sizable amount of equity into the business and put investment into the RMM business where it needs to grow."

George comes to Zenith RMM from OATSystems, an RFID software developer, where he was CEO. OAT was acquired by Checkpoint Systems in June 2008. Prior to that, George was CEO of Bowstreet, a portal infrastructure developer.

"A major objective we have as a company is to make our MSP partners the most successful in the business, and by successful we mean most profitable. Right at the top of our priorities around investment in areas natural to a software oriented team: autonomic improvement, sales and marketing enablement, the ability to go out and secure more customers for themselves," George said.

Summit Partners, a Boston-based firm, invests in technology companies and saw a need to split Zenith RMM into a separate company to focus on the remote monitoring and manage space, said Jason Glass, a principal at Summit Partners.

"There's a compelling opportunity for this market. SMBs everywhere need the RMM from MSPs. They used to be break/fix [customers] and now it's evolving. They need remote functionality. It's an under-penetrated market," Glass said.

Zenith Infotech customers can also look to see more improvements on products but not any new major product launches in the near future, Saraf said.

"More feature–rich [products] also allow MSP partners sell more up market. If you're a small business player, it will allow MSPs to sell to slightly larger business customers than today," Saraf said.

Today, nearly 3,000 MSP partners use the Zenith RMM platform to manage almost 400,000 endpoints, according to the company.

Zenith Infotech and Zenith RMM partners will have to pay two bills if they use the products from both companies, but Summit's Glass noted that customers were already doing that so it shouldn't be any additional work for them.

"It's the same from that perspective. What is new is that [George] will be recruiting a world class team, adding more folks around product development and sales and marketing. Day One is not going to change but down the road, they will have better communication with customers and more of a product roadmap," Glass said.