Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 1)

Business professionals rely heavily on their companies’ IT departments, and the larger the company, the larger the demand. Fortunately, there are companies like Axios Systems that have developed ways to make IT service management for medium to large enterprises easier and more efficient. Founded in 1988 by Tasos Symeonides, Axios remains a privately owned company operated by the Symeonides family. The company has acquired a global clientele, has headquarters in the United States and the United Kingdom, and stands at $50 million in revenue at the time of this interview.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Markos. Let’s start with some background about you and Axios Systems.

Markos Symeonides: Axios Systems is company that was founded in 1988. It’s still focused on one area, which is IT service management software solutions. Those solutions are, effectively, the separate platform that is used to manage all of the day-to-day operations of an IT department, managing all of the different processes and capabilities that an IT department offers and delivering its services to the business. We’ve been providing these solutions for almost 25 years, and we do it on a global scale. Our North American headquarters is in Virginia. Our European headquarters is in Edinburgh in the U.K. We have offices around the world. The software has been used in 50 countries and in some 16 languages now. It’s the same product, Assyst, that we have been taking to market for the better part of a quarter of a century.

Ninety percent of our business is focused on replacing legacy technologies in the space from some of the framework vendors, like HP, and come over legacy technologies with a more disruptive approach. What I mean by that is we offer capabilities that, whether they’re in a private cloud or are capabilities we deliver software-as-a-service, they are provided with a modern approach. There’s a modern user experience. It’s straightforward to implement. The systems always upgrade. It’s a little bit like if you were using your Gmail, for example. You don’t know what version you’re on in Gmail. You don’t care. That’s the approach we take to upgrades with the system. That’s quite a different approach for enterprise IT systems. A lot of people are used to having to spend a lot of time, effort, and money on upgrading those systems over time. With our products, we’re able to constantly get our customers on the latest release. Upgrades don’t break any of your configurations, customizations and whatnot.

With the more recent version of the software – the one just released is number 10 – there are a lot of capabilities in there around social IT management. Things like peer-to-peer support, crowdsourced IT support, rich collaboration sessions, things like being able to access IT through a smartphone or tablet device. Each of these has a capability to get into it.

As for my background, I literally grew up in the business. We’re a privately held organization, still owned by my family. There are five of us who still own it and work in the organization in different ways.

SM: How big is your company in terms of revenue?

MS: It’s a $50 million revenue company.

SM: Are your customers Fortune 500, global 2000 companies, mid-market? Where is your sweet spot?

MS: I would say the sweet spot is in the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000. We’ve got customers in the Fortune 50, a handful of them. But I think any organization with at least 3,000 to 5,000 upwards. We’re not really dealing with the small and low-end organizations. We serve medium to large enterprises. Our largest organizations in the Fortune 50 have 300,000-plus employees. Our sweet spot is between 5,000 and 25,000 employees, that type of organization. We have a lot of customers in that segment.

SM: Who founded this company?

MS: My father, Tasos Symeonides.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems
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