By Allan Maurer

With its product aimed at automating IT business operations moving from beta testing to customers, Atlanta’s Virima Technologies expects an elongated sales cycle, says founder and serial entrepreneur Palaniswamy “Raj” Rajan, the company’s CEO. “We’re ready to go out on the sales front,” says Rajan. “The economy is tough. The market is tough. We’ll just have to work twice as hard.”

Rajan says that Virima’s software addresses a pain point for companies with large IT operations such as in the financial services, banking, telecom, and broadcasting industries. Rajan sums up the reason succinctly: “They don’t like downtime,” he says. So there is a demand for a product that automatically keeps IT operations running smoothly.

Palaniswamy “Raj” Rajan, Founder of Virima

Creating the product didn’t happen overnight, Rajan says. “This is a complex problem. Getting a proper understanding of it and finding the best approach, the most elegant solution, took six to nine months working with a chief information officer advisory board.”

The company actually trashed the first version it came up with because it wasn’t as elegant and flexible as it wanted. It rebuilt it using what they had learned focusing on artificial intelligence and automatic computing.

The company is selling what it calls “the first automated and intelligent IT Business Operations Automation (IT-BOA) platform. It lets CIOs peer deep into the enterprise IT system and delivers actionable data. “Our software comprehensively captures the IT system,” says Rajan.

A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of large enterprises in North America do not have automated asset discovery and inventory management in place despite that IT assets are a large percentage of an organization’s capital expense. So Virima sees a demand for its product.

“Far too many organizations have fragmented IT environments, decentralized asset management, and complex and outdated IT management tools and, as a result, depend on informal and ad hoc relationships to solve problems,” says Rajan.

Rajan says Joey D’s Oak Room is “the place to be seen”
in the perimeter area.

Using the Virima software, Rajan explains, CIOs look into the heart of their IT systems via a datacenter, which includes information not only about physical assets such as servers, storage systems and PCs, but also intangible assets such as business processes and details about where assets are located.

The software, Rajan says, “Actually talks to people. It interacts with them though email, instant messaging, the Web, and asks for information, the kind of semantic data only available from a human. Our software knows what information is semantic and who it needs to talk with to get that data.

The company says its intended to transform IT management from a focus on systems and networks to include people, processes, relationships and historical events using autonomic computing. Doing so can save companies money three ways, says Rajan.

“It lowers administrative costs because you don’t need as much personnel time to manage the system,” he says.

“Because it automatically gathers data, you have greater visibility into the system.” That means executives can make decisions faster. “Eighty percent of the typical decision making process is gathering facts, only 20 percent is analysis,” says Rajan.

“You get a lot of nickel and dime savings that add up as you make thousands of decisions a year that only take ten minutes instead of an hour. It improves productivity.”
The product also reduces errors, which translates into less downtime, he adds.

Aimed at Fortune 1000 companies, the software is sold as SaaS for $5,000 a month for unlimited users or via a license on premises. The company says it cuts the total cost of owning IT management suites by 50 percent.

The company will offer incentives to early adopters, he adds.

Founded in 2007 by Rajan and Karun Rajasekharan, the eight employee company has raised about $1.5 million from angel investors. It will need a $5 million round to fully execute its business plan, Rajan says.

Its management team are all entrepreneurs with previous companies. Rajan holds three technology patents and has successfully launched and managed three technology companies over the past 15 years, including Vigilar Inc., an information security technology firm, and eLaunchpad, an early-stage venture capital firm/incubator focusing on IT infrastructure and network security technologies.

Rajan, who came to Atlanta in 1993 and launched his previous companies in the city, says, “When you look at the startup community in Atlanta, the energy around it, you wouldn’t think there is a recession going on. There is a great diversity of large companies, a vibrant startup community and bright technologists.

The company is located in the perimeter area and Rajan says the place to be seen in that “little pocket of the Atlanta tech community,” is Joey D’s.

Online: www.virima.com

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