Zyrion develops business service management software for midsize companies. BSM helps business units and IT managers understand how changes to equipment and applications, as well as outages, affect business operations. BSM can help organizations prioritize responses to infrastructure problems and meet service-level agreements.
--Andrew Conry-Murray

As IT environments become more complex because of service-oriented architectures, virtualization, and other new technologies, it's harder to see the connections between IT infrastructure and business operations. Business service management illuminates those connections. While most BSM software is meant for large enterprises, Zyrion aims for the midmarket.

Traverse monitors the performance of network devices, servers, databases, applications, and other parts of the IT infrastructure. IT can organize these data into what Zyrion calls "business containers," which represent different services, such as a customer-facing Web application or an internal VoIP system. Traverse also measures application performance via synthetic transactions to ensure that applications are responding within acceptable parameters. Web-based dashboards provide real-time metrics.

Business service management is an ideal mechanism to get a holistic view of the roles that discrete systems play in delivering critical services to customers. Zyrion and competitors such as Nimsoft and Firescope are targeting midsize companies that want in on BSM. Regardless of what vendors say, BSM is complex and only provides value when deployed on top of an orderly, well-managed infrastructure. If you don't know what you have, where it is, and how it's configured, you're not ready for BSM.

Aggarwal and Rashid come from Fidelia, which sold an IT management product that was acquired by Network General. They licensed software from Fidelia and built BSM capabilities on top to create Traverse.