Technology Innovation and Adoption Is the Need of the Hour

Starting as a division of Zoho Corporation in 1996, ManageEngine offered software products for telecom network Management, initially, with a goal to ensure consistently good network connectivity.

In 2002-2003 the Indian telecom market still had excess capacity, so they planned to diversify the business into the IT networking management market. With this objective, the company launched a unique product for enterprise IT management, under the brand name of ManageEngine.

ManageEngine offered solutions for application, server, desktop, network and IT directory monitoring as well as service software. Internal to the enterprise IT, their product supported network, application, storage, servers, LAN, WAN, Microsoft infrastructure, physical infrastructure as well virtual infrastructure and extended that into cloud infrastructure also. Over the last decade they ensured that their products were cloud ready for the market, when it came to adoption of new technology. ManageEngine today is being used by 95,000 organizations worldwide. The customers are spread across mid market, SMB and enterprise. Excerpts from interview with Sridhar Iyengar, Vice President – Product Management, ManageEngine

How do you look at the enterprise market and what are the solutions you are offering?

We started off with the SMB segment as they were much more open to adopt new products, new companies and new vendors. From there on we moved on to enterprises and mid market. Our enterprise accounts have come through industry references. We have been in Gartner magic quarter three times in a row, which gave us validation from industry experts, so attracted a lot of industry attention.

A few years ago enterprises approached only trusted VARs and SIs, but today lot of them are scaling up to value and our products are available online to evaluate. We have good online presence and a very good online trading practice..

How are your solutions compatible to the technologies like BYOD, SDDC, Hybrid Cloud and how much adoption has been done?

We consider ourselves as leaders in technology adoption. Our Mobility solutions have been adopted by companies to a very large extent. Every site has mobile version of our product. Mobile products are ensuring our IT team is working 24×7. They are today on the top of their game. MDM (Mobile Device Management) and BYOD are also on our radar as they are the new trend in the enterprise market. .

What is the present focus of the company?

Our focus is to serve the IT market. The increasing popularity of IT and is driving the adoption of a lot of new technologies. Is the trend now. It provides high quality IT service. So, catering to the industry, we are focusing on software solutions that are easy to use, easy to deploy and easy on the budget, like ITON.

Which are the potential verticals for your business?

BFSI, IT/ITES, Logistics, government, military organization, education are the few sectors where we see lot of growth for or business.

Where is the growth coming from for ManageEngine?

The target audience for us is IT/ITES organization and within that we have seen lot adoption – that is our area of growth. There’s more awareness of ITON enabled software which is getting popular in India and is being adopted by many organizations. We have seen adoption of cloud in the enterprises as well, and that is another growth channel for us..

With the diverse portfolio of products that we have, and the time that we have spent in the market we have seen growth across our products offering in almost all the verticals.

Which are the potential sectors out of Enterprise, mid market and SMB for ManageEngine?

Mid size market and SMB are the most critical sectors for us as we have seen a lot of adoption in the sectors. However, we also have large projects in enterprise segment as well.

How do you look at your channel strategies? How they help you move up the value chain?

Our resellers, distributors, value added resellers and system integrators are our extended arms. One big advantage that ManageEngine has in India, is that of close proximity to the market. This helps us be tuned to the market – basically culturally and geographically. . In addition to that we are in a product business so we rely on our partners to represent us in various parts of India and worldwide. To help them achieve our targets, we also train these partners as well.

Second is System Integrators- we have SIs from India who operate on a global level. For eg HCL, Infosys, TCS, Wipro are all global company and work with us and build up overall solutions and that’s how we cater to the market.

What are the benefits for partners while associating with ManageEngine?

Our philosophy behind growth operation is the philosophy we want to develop product, sensible technology. Most of our channel partners are with us for the long term, which means they too have a business interest of profits with a long term partner. They are working with a global company, and we are also reaping the advantage of a long terms channel. So we usually identify a partner who is a global player, has cultural knowledge so these are the advantages that a partner has working with us.