Founded by two brothers out of a Stanford University research project in late 1999, venture backed from 2000 and now already into its third successful round of venture finance, Infravio, Inc. is fast making a name for itself in the Web Services Management space, and spoke with SYS-CON.TV at Web Services Edge 2005 about its latest announcements, and about the history of the company.

Headquartered in Cupertino, California, the VC firms backing Infravio include Walden International and Crystal Ventures, as well as NetIQ Corp. The investment of a significant amount of capital by NetIQ, a Nasdaq-traded company, is especially significant, CEO Srinivas Balasumbramanian told SYS-CON Group Publisher Jeremy Geelan. 

"It keeps the technology innovation flowing within the company, which is exactly what they wanted, and gives us a great chance of building a standalone business, rather than having them just buy the company, like HP did with Talking Blocks. We believe that in the long run this will be more productive for both the companies involved."

"We are soon going to be releasing a joint product with them and we are very positive about the expected revenue stream from that," said Balasumbramanian.

View Srinivas Balasubramanian With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV

"Infravio has several large worldwide customers," said Balusubramanian, including Providence Health System, Sabre, and British American Tobacco." The first version of their Web Services registry product line, X-registry, recently became available at the Sabre Travel Network portal (Sabre).

"We believe there's an opportunity for a start-up company to be the Web services registry of choice," he continued, "to be the de facto Web services registry, and that's what we're aiming to do at this point."

"A lot of us, including some very big players, believe 2005 is going to be The Year of Web Services...and the registry market should blossom within the next year or two."

Infravio, Balusubramanian added, announced at Web Services Edge 2005 that X-registry has earned the "Certified for SAP NetWeaver" designation.

"Our SAP integration certification reflects a common design goal shared by SAP NetWeaver and X-registry - to enable and manage change," he said. "We also share a common architectural world view, highlighting services-based, enterprise-scale business solutions offering the increased levels of adaptability, flexibility, and openness that reduce total cost of ownership. Infravio, with this latest SAP certification, delivers on that world view for our customers."

The "Certified for SAP NetWeaver" designation is awarded to products that feature integration with the SAP NetWeaver platform - in Infravio's case via an SAP Enterprise Portal iView for SAP Enterprise Portal 5.0. 

View Srinivas Balasubramanian With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV

Company vice president of products and services, Jim Bole, presented at Web Services Edge 2005. Bole's session was entitled "Web Services Security - A Key Element of SOA Governance" and was a real-world view of the SOA landscape, together with an in-depth look at the security implications that it embodies, and emerging best practices in the areas of Web services security and SOA policy and governance. 

Infravio executives were available throughout the show, demonstrating how X-registry delivers on the SOA promise of service reuse that dramatically improves IT responsiveness to business needs. "The quality of leads has been excellent," Balusubramanian commented. "We are seeing a lot of traffic and are hopeful that we will gain a lot of traction from the show."