On the eve of their South East Asia User Conference 2023 to be held in Singapore, ManageEngine invited Data & Storage Asean to spend the morning with three of their senior executives.
We spent time understanding their product strategy vision and their plans for the ASEAN market.
As part of Zoho Corporation, ManageEngine began its journey in 2002 with a single and simple aim of building software tools to manage enterprise IT.
According to ManageEngine’s President Rajesh Ganesan, the plan was no more complex than that. They started with point products in the IT service management space, and to cut a long story short, by 2023 they have 5000 employees, over 280,000 customers, and 120 software tools across 7 functional pillars including enterprise service management, IT operations management, endpoint management, IAM/PAM, analytics, SIEM and low code app development.
With such an extensive array of software tools to manage almost every aspect of IT, Rajesh explained it was time to bring everything together and painted his vision for how ManageEngine will be a platform for enabling digital operations.
The power of the parts means that ManageEngine aims to be the partner that helps companies evolve their operations to become fully digital, more than that Rajesh feels that ManageEngine can and does provide a platform that enables organisations to keep pace with the future of work.
If you are starting to wonder what the future of work might look like, it turns out that ManageEngine has been thinking about this for some time. Rajesh shared that they break it down by what they refer to as the Three W’s – Workplace, Workforce and Workloads.
The post-Covid workplace has changed forever. It is no longer the four walls of your HQ and some fixed remote locations. The workplace is now literally any place where someone can work from, regardless of location.
The workforce is undergoing the same transformation. In the modern world, the workforce refers to every individual that contributes to your business. The future workforce is diverse and includes full-time employees, gig workers, contractors, outsourcers, and even suppliers. Old methods of access no longer work when you try to accommodate the modern workforce.
Workloads have also evolved. Literally every piece of hardware or software that touches your business is part of your workload, even down to the web browsers that your workforce uses.
ManageEngine is pulling together its 120 products into a unified platform to enable businesses to manage modern practices based on digital operations.
When it comes to ASEAN countries, Rajesh and his team are confident they are on the right track. ManageEngine ran a survey of ASEAN companies and found some interesting insights that show the need for modernisation is there.
They found that 57% of IT and business decision-makers already acknowledge that the decentralisation of IT increases the scope for innovation and 73% of IT decision-makers are already seeing a decentralisation of their IT structure, with non-IT departments adding IT skills and resources, as company-wide operations become digital. This still needs to be managed and made secure, making the ManageEngine proposition even more relevant than ever.
These grand plans sound impressive, but if we let reality kick in, very few companies across ASEAN are likely to suddenly go “all in” with ManageEngine, and entrust each of the seven pillars under the ManageEngine Unified platform.
Arun Kumar, ManageEngine’s Regional Director for Asia and Europe, explained that they don’t expect companies in ASEAN to jump “all in”.
In fact, the beauty of the ManageEngine approach is that from the smallest to the largest company, the starting point can still be a single-point product from the list of 120 products available. So a company’s starting point with ManageEngine doesn’t have to be strategic, it can be based on a single-point solution to solve a small tactical issue.
Arun’s approach is to build long-term relationships and more importantly build trust with their customers, expanding products they use within and then eventually across pillars.
This works, because according to Arun the products and the support prove themselves, so when the experience is good, trust grows, leading clients to expand their use of the ManageEngine portfolio based on long-term partnerships.
On the question of why ASEAN, Arun explained that their investment and dedication to the ASEAN market are not new. In fact, they already have 5000 customers across the region, but all the economic indicators show that ASEAN is poised for significant growth and the demand for the solutions that ManageEngine offer will follow that curve.
As a result, ManageEngine is putting significant investment into the region. This means investments in recruiting and training new and existing partners, investments in making local hires across each ASEAN country, and ultimately investments in data centres across the region.
The data centre component is really important. Whilst ManageEngine does allow you to install their licences on the public cloud, that is not their preferred cloud delivery mechanism. ManageEngine SaaS offerings are built on their own cloud in their own data centres (or at least their own racks). This is so they can take 100% ownership of uptime and quality of service, they are never dependent on the availability and performance of someone else’s cloud.
Arun is also aware that across ASEAN many organisations are still not ready for the cloud (in fact nearly 50% of the customers still operate on-premises) and it is for that reason, they fully expect to be offering cloud/SaaS and on-premises options for customers across ASEAN for the foreseeable future.
For companies in ASEAN looking to invest in ManageEngine solutions, their approach is well thought through. Strong offerings, investment in local resources, but also an understanding that every country in Southeast Asia has its own nuances and demands, hence the significant investment in enabling and supporting local partners across the region.
It’s clear that ManageEngine has a vision. It is also clear they have a portfolio that will continue to grow and is becoming increasingly relevant as companies become increasingly digitised.
