What happened to Zenith InfoTech?
Zenith Infotech; once on top in the MSP space for Remote Monitoring and management, backup and disaster recovery, help desk and support, and cloud solutions is on serious life support and the plug may be pulled very soon. It was reported today In a required revaluation of what’s left of the company after selling the RMM division; the cloud business has seen a 27 percent negative growth for the last two quarters as reported by Ernst & Young.
None of this is good news considering the state of the company with bond holders and the Mumbai High Court. For a company that had owned the U.S. MSP space for years, it is unimaginable that just a few years later; the company would be left in this state considering its place in the community.
Looking to the past, I had worked for and with companies that used Zenith Infotech products. Zenith really brought integrated Remote management, help desk, and backup into a single solution, making transitioning to an MSP model easy for break fix providers. Early adopters were prized with good service, easy implementation, and kept promises.
As growth occurred in the space and with the company, customer service levels, ticket resolution times, and product support was affected. This had an impact on many MSP’s and had some looking for other solutions. As the MSP market grew so did competition and many other new and seasoned vendors in the space began nipping at the heels of the company.
This had Zenith looking to new products to sustain its future. The BDR (backup and disaster recovery) solution that Zenith introduced to the MSP community with a huge following and major sales numbers began to see hardware and software failures. For a product based around disaster recovery, the recovery portion was causing frustration and headaches for many users and the product was getting a reputation for not working when needed.
In 2009 Zenith introduced its cloud and virtualization platform which would later be named SmartStyle. The initial entry was a hefty investment, but promises of private cloud infrastructure, on premise virtualization, VDI, and cloud backup all in a single solution, managed by a local MSP owned data center, excited many MSP’s and had them writing the check. After more than a year of delays, partners were frustrated and had yet to see their promised solutions. The delays continued and many dropped out of the program.
In October of 2011 it was reported that Zenith was facing a default on debt of $33M with no signs of the company being able to pay or convert it into equity. Just a month prior in September of 2011 Zenith had sold off the Remote Monitoring and Mangement (RMM) division of its company to Summit Partners, leaving the company as a cloud solutions offering.
Since then the company has been fighting an uphill battle in court, and the latest news may see the final stages coming sooner than expected. This story seems to be a forewarning to other vendors in the community. It is not all about product; instead your product will help drive business, customer support will maintain business, stay on top of growth or lose business, and pay your bills to keep your business…
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Great insightful post Frank—best line you delivered there, comes near the end,….
“This story seems to be a forewarning to other vendors in the community. It is not all about product; instead your product will help drive business, customer support will maintain business, stay on top of growth or lose business, and pay your bills to keep your business…”
As a former customer I can say I bailed out a while ago, the signs have been coming for a very long time. Service was non existent and simple issues took days to get resolved only if you where lucky. Documentation was inconsistent….. this, I believe, was the downfall of a good company. Take Away: Document your service so that those that actually can read will find correct information, wrong information is worse then none.
It is business as usual with the Zenith team rebranded as Continuum. Might as well just spelled Zenith backwards to come up with a name “Htinez RMM” but Htinez doesn’t associate well with any current television series.
Now Akash Saraf and his sister Devita Saraf(ZenithScam Masterminds) sitting on top of the 33 Million (Dollars, not Rupes)they defaulted on, sells ??? the RMM division to Summit Partners literally weeks before they default on the loans, pocketing another sizable fortune to stuff in their in their gunny sacks while laughing all the way to the courts. With that kind of money you can get the absolute best attorneys in the world to help hid your money, while you spend a year or two winding down the show by appearing to attempt
to raise the fledgeling operation like a Phoenix from the burnt ruins.
Now look around and ask “Who is this Michael George with Summit Partners and what do they do? Summit Partners and Michael George buy software companies, polish them up with lipstick on the marketing, gloss over the website, spin marketing webs and news releases all the while pumping this golden goose up with a silver gavage of smoke an mirrors so they can sell it off to a real software company like GFI (all conjecture and spectulation) but isn’t that why forums exist. If you’re in Continuum now, get out. If you were with Zenith and stayed with Continuum to see what will happen, you already know its the SAME marketing and management team that was sold with the software. They claim they purchased the 300 person NOC in India but that same NOC (junior tech training ground opportunity for college techs needing night jobs in India) outsources to many other fortune 500 compaines and is simply outsourcing itself back to Continuum. Nothing at the NOC has changed. They never show any pictures of it. If it were such a gem you would have pictures and videos online to show it off. Reality is that it is probably a loosly run warehouse space with plastic white stacking chairs and card tables setup as engineers with 1-2 years of IT training dial into servers in an attempt to remediate high level server problems which most end up “we attempted to restart your server and it is not coming back online. Please to send a on-site tech as soon as possible”. So you have now, instead of a server with a small problem, a crashed server with who knows who jacked the registery trying to fix and now its your problem with no notes, no audit trail, and somebodys who wrote the trash SAAZ software has a backdoor password to every corporate server you ever loaded the agent on. Don’t believe me, check your active directory for a administrator with SaaZ in the name. What ever data in lan that server is attached to is easy pickings for corporate thiefs. And how close is Mumbai to Pakistan? About 500 miles. Any idea what the political climate is in that part of the country? Would you go walking to the market in Mumbai if you are from the US or UK? Only if you wanted to be kidnapped, killed, held for ransom or worse…. You are giving your secure US server passwords to these guys? Run away from Continuum, very far away and stay away until it can be absorbed into Dell or GFI or go for the good guys and get your Made In USA software from the Good Guys at Labtech.
Again, all conjecture and spectulation here and although written by a raving lunatic driven mad by the false promises and web of lies spun by Zenith marketing pros, its not all that unimaginable and just might be true.
Why, always why does Akash Saraf Zenith CEO always have that ice-cream eating grin on his face??? 33 Million reasons why. You would be smiling too. 100% legal and they will get away with it. Maybe even buy it back from Michael George and his cohorts at Summit Partners. Maybe under Akash’s sons name to raise the flag and do it again, just like he learned from his dad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chETQCC9XwY
Google more and learn the genius behind this totally legal fakir multi-million dollar cup and ball game.
All in the family….. RUN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7gbpRclMO0
Thanks for the great article Frank, you really got me going after loosing only $50,000 to these guys. Just a couple more links about the boiler-room high pressure sales tactits used by Zenith to hook poor MSP unsuspecting geeks into into buying their shoddy products.
This guy is the high pressure-sales sweat shop operator and trainer:
“honest abe” Maurice Saluan known to send cease and desist orders to anyone and everyone who writes something negative about ” him or his company in a public open internet forum. Hey Maurice…this is America. We gots this think called Freedom of Speech and the right to express our opinion openly.
(disclaimer: the above information is purely conjecture and speculation and is intended to be interperted as a “parody” of an individual and company and not as slander or libel) So please do not call out the dogs and start sending me letters.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/maurice-saluan/4/667/663
Don’t judge the link to the book above, by its cover.
http://www.ripoffreport.com/computer-software/zenith-infotech/zenith-infotech-deceptive-pra-5F77D.htm