Zyme Solutions for systemizing sales
Zyme(Industry Leadership In Channel Data Solutions) was founded by Chandran Sankaran with a mission: to address the channel visibility problem in the high-tech industry.
For the likes of Dell and SanDisk to sell their products, there are over 6,000 distributors and a million retailers around the world. It’s a very fragmented distribution system and it means that technology companies have a hard time figuring out how much they sell, which products sell more, which less, and in which regions sales happens. The data is also voluminous, and becoming increasingly so, making it difficult for internal IT system to copy with it.
Sankaran pictured a solution where he establish a data center to which retailers could upload their sales, and manufacturers could then access the same. He approached a global tech company with that idea and said he would take their entire distribution tracking exercise off their hands. The company agreed. With this project Sankaran step ahead and in 2004 he formed Zyme.
Today, many of the world’s biggest IT brands are Zyme coustomers. That includes Logitech, Symantec, Seagate, Dell, Xerox, SanDisk, LG and Cisco.
Shankaran grew up in Bangalore, studied in IIT-Madras, where he graduated form in 1983, and went to Yale in the US for a Master’s in computer science. His first job was with Hewlett-Packard. In 1998,he returned to India with the idea of starting something here in IT services, but before long he got the feeling that the thought was ahead of its time. So, in 1990 he returned to the US to consult for HP, and a year later joined McKinsey where he spent six years. For a couple of years after that, he ran the heig-tech vertical of i2 technologies, the supply chain management software and services company founded by Sanjiv Sidhu and Ken Sharma in Dallas, Texas.
Later he left that to found a company of his own called ClosedLoop Solutions, which was cloudbased enterprise budgetary and planning solution. It became successful startup. In 2003 it was acquired by Lawson software for $4 million. After few months he got the Zyme opportunity.
“It important to believe totally in your idea” he says.
