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Interview with Al Eisaian, CEO and Co-founder of Integrien

My interview this morning is with Al Eisaian, CEO and Co-Founder, of Pasadena-based Integrien (www.integrien.com). Integrien recently raised a round of venture funding for its integrity management solutions.

BK: What is Integrian all about, and what are your products?

AE: We provide integrity management solutions that allow enterprise IT organizations to predict, prevent and heal problems in technology-based business systems. Our product, Integrien Alive Transaction Integrity Manager, holistically maps a real-time view of the end-to-end health of mission critical business transactions through complex IT ecosystems. It warns of looming system constraints before they threaten business performance, pinpoints failure points, deduces causes, and recommends or triggers best practice responses to return systems to full operating integrity. As a result, our customers experience higher-quality business operations that are more efficient, continuously available and far easier to maintain.

BK: How long have Integrien's solutions been available on the market?

AE: Integrien Alive first shipped in 2003.

BK: How long has the company been around?

AE: Dr. Mazda Marvasti, PhD, and I started Integrien together in 2001. We've spent the last four years focused on developing our product and building a customer base. We are officially launching Integrien on Monday, May 16th, by announcing our $6.5 million Series A round of venture capital funding, led by Clearstone Venture Partners. This will give us the resources needed to grow rapidly over the next few months.

BK: How did you decide to work with Clearstone, and how difficult was it for you to find Series A funding?

AE: The Series A funding was neither easy nor overly difficult. We had built a great relationship with Phil Ressler and Jim Armstrong and went with Clearstone knowing they would be very helpful in helping us grow Integrien, as would the Tech Coast Angels and a few individuals who also took part in the round.

BK: Where are you in terms of company stage and product availability?

AE: We already have a number of paying customers including Baxter Healthcare, who recently won Computerworld's "Best Practices in Enterprise Management" award for their Alive implementation.

BK: Why did you decide to found Integrian, and what need did you see in the market?

AE: Integrien took on responsibility for supporting a number of complex IT infrastructures as part of the consulting work we did after forming the company and then hitting the lull in the high-tech business associated with the events of 9/11. Mazda was sometimes in the position of getting infrastructure alerts at 3 a.m., which did not please his wife, particularly when the alerts didn't pinpoint the problem so he could do something about it. Then he realized that his Ph.D. work in predicting the behavior of complex interdependent systems might allow him to not only pinpoint the root cause of problems, but also to predict such problems very early, before they impacted the business. The rapid success of the resulting tool told us we had the basis of a successful company.

BK: Thanks!