Climbing the VAR500 Mountain: Why it matters and what it means

Last week we issued a press release announcing we were named to the VAR500 list, a fact that we were (are!) pretty excited about. This is our fourth year on the VAR500 and we’re proud of the fact that we keep climbing the list. This year we moved up five spots to 351. Also, it’s worth mentioning that we are the only hedge fund technology integrator on the list.

Check out this graphic to see our steady climb.

Not everyone is likely familiar with the VAR500 technology integrator list or understands why it matters, so let me fill you in. The VAR500 list is created every year by Everything Channel and identifies North America’s top technology integrators or value added resellers (VARs). It is estimated that there are nearly 90,000 VARs in North America alone, so being in the top 500, make that top 400, is a great accomplishment.

Technology heavy weights, including Microsoft, HP, Cisco and Symantec, all rely on the VAR500 to sell their products and deliver value adding solutions to end-user firms. Needless to say, those four companies are close Eze Castle Integration partners. In fact, Microsoft filmed a video about us in June 2010, which we look forward to sharing in the next month.

So what gets you on the list? It’s a combination of revenue growth and product breadth, which typically go hand-in-hand. Here at Eze Castle Integration we continually expand our hedge fund product and service offerings to ensure our solutions match our clients’ needs.

As an example of this, we heard from clients that they needed disaster recovery solutions but often paused at the cost of traditional DR offerings. To lower the barriers to entry we developed a virtual disaster recovery offering that provides the business protection and high availability hedge funds need, but at a fraction of the cost of traditional DR systems.

We took a similar approach with the hedge fund business infrastructure. We developed a hosted hedge fund platform that provides the business applications and infrastructure a hedge fund needs to operate and is delivered as a bundled monthly service. With our hosted IT service, Eze Virtual Office, hedge funds gain an enterprise-grade hedge fund infrastructure and are able to minimize operating expenditures.

So Eze DR and Eze Virtual Office are two examples of new hedge fund managed services that helped us make the VAR500 list.

Looking forward to climbing further up the 2011 list!