TALKPOINT

Raj Sabhlok President of ManageEngine

A COMPREHENSIVE FOCUS

— By R. Narayan

ManageEngine, the IT management division of Zoho Corporation hosted its ninth Middle East User Conference in Dubai earlier this year where it also unveiled its new product for Privileged Session Management. Raj Sabhlok, president of ManageEngine discusses the focus areas of the company

How have the annual customer conferences been received?

They have been quite useful for our customers. IT demands continued learning as new technologies evolve. The event is great for customers for come back and learn about what’s new and new tools that they could implement. A lot of customers come here to get re-certified. It is a badge of expertise and honor as part of your whole set of certifications.

Are there overlaps in terms of product lines and market focus between ManageEngine and Zoho?

tegrated for both Zoho and ManageEngine. At Zoho, we look at Businesses in terms of departments and one of them is IT. IT tools from Zoho have been typically developed by Manage Engine for Zoho. ServiceDesk Plus, which is our IT service management solution is marketed by Zoho in the IT category. There is no overlap in the sense of product development, so it is not that what Zoho is developing, ManageEngine is also developing. Rather, there is a lot of cross marketing. Conversely, we also take the analytics tools from Zoho and we market them under ManageEngine for our audience. Zoho has a low-code no-code tool on the IT side and we market that as well. There are more synergies than overlaps between Zoho and ManageEngine.

How different are markets of focus?

Both divisions target horizontal markets. In the adoption curve, Zoho’s sweet spots are in the small and medium size Business segment whereas ManageEngine has certainly catered to the SME segment along the way but finds now the larger companies globally using ManageEngine tools pretty regularly. We probably have the broadest suite of IT management tools today. I strongly believe that we have comfortably surpassed our traditional competitors along the way.

What would be the size of Business for the company globally?

the revenues should be several hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues globally. We have close 200,000 customers. Most of the Fortune 500 customers use ManageEngine. We have over 3000 employees worldwide. That perhaps gives an idea of the scale of our size of Business.

Elaborate on the difference in solutions focus?

At Zoho, solutions are offered from a Business application side, addressing every functional areas of the Business, every key Business process- finance, HR, IT etc. Our strategy at ManageEngine has been similar, with respect to computing solutions stack in ManageEngine, we offer solutions around the network, server, applications and security. We want to be comprehensive in the tools we provide for our customers in the targeted markets.

Discuss the enhancement in your Access Manager Plus?

Access Manager Plus is a solution that builds upon our focus on security over the past several years. When we talk of security from an IT department’s perspective, they have under the purview very important IT assets like databases, applications or hardware infrastructure etc, which are typically password protected. We introduced Password manager pro several years ago. This is an industrial strength, enterprise IT grade privileged password management solution for IT organizations, where the user goes through an authentication server called password manager providing additional level of security to the applications and best practices in terms of password protection of these assets.

In the distributed organizations, you have hundreds if not thousands of password protected assets. Normally, if you have traversed in getting to these assets, you often did have to jump to remotely login to a server to get to another and so on (called jumpboxing. We have simplified this with the Access Manager by providing authentication for you, handling the jumpboxing for you so that you can get straight to the asset you are interested in and at the same time keeping an incredibly high level of security. It gives you remote login capabilities across multiple hops, all in a very secure manner. It is all a part of what we call PAM 360 (Privileged access management) offering, which include Password Manager Pro and there is also a key management part for SSL certificate sand so on. So we have different components as part of PAM 360, all related to password management of assets for IT organizations.

How has the Business in the region been?

For the region, we have seen a growth around 30%. With our size, to grow at 30% is pretty significant. Looking at wow we are growing relative to the industry we are in, it becomes more obvious. The IT management industry grows at 8% and by that measure, we are growing almost four times the rate at which the market is growing.

How has AI been incorporated in your solutions?

There is a lot happening in terms of integrating AI. AI is coming into our operations tools, monitoring and performance management tools already have AI where we are able to do root cause analysis, predictive analysis and so on. We have introduced a conversational AI assistant that you can communicate with using voice commands. We have borrowed that technology from Zoho called Zia. We can ask Zia to show us reports, tell us which servers are vulnerable as they are not updated on patches, which are the areas where AI is coming into play. We also leverage chatbots which are AI based, where users can ask questions, both technicians and end users and the chatbot responds with answers or take actions. We are pretty well down the path in incorporating AI across pretty much all applicable products.

How do you see the role of ManageEngine in enabling digital transformation?

Our products are about customer experience, employee experience and so you can think of ManageEngine as a provider of a digital transformation framework.

There has been a lot made out of digital transformation. In many cases, Businesses have failed in these initiatives. A lot of it has to do with organizations are not aligned with what they want to get out of the digital transformation initiatives. Instead of the Big Bang approaches, there is a need to get back to basics like and enhance some of the way technologies are used within the organizations and allow IT to lead some of these digital transformation initiatives. They should focus on why they are doing it- hopefully to make the Business more efficient and also keeping constituents in mind- employees, customers etc in the centre of focus. Digital transformation initiatives by and large has missed all of that. Not being aligned with all the goals of the company etc has been a key reason of failures and there is the need to ensure that the focus of these initiatives is on customers and employees.

From a customer perspective, focus on customer experience and for employees, look at automating routine tasks, projects that can help them become more productive etc. In development of solutions, there is a number of technologies for developers from the lowcode, no code platforms that help turn out applications faster.

Are there any plans to open a datacenter in the region?

We have plans for a datacenter in the region by end of the year. As of now, we have datacenters in India, US, Europe, China and Australia.