ManageEngine helps build your digital transformation journey

Digital leaders have been talking about the importance of digital transformation for years, and as the IT management division of Zoho Corp., ManageEngine prioritizes flexible solutions that work for all businesses, regardless of size or budget. ManageEngine crafts comprehensive IT management software with a focus on making your job easier. The 90+ products and free tools cover everything your IT needs, at prices you can afford. Here, Shailesh Davey, Co-Founder and Engineering – Head, ManageEngine, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: Tell us what ManageEngine has been up to.

Answer: Our parent company Zoho Corporation has three divisions – Zoho.com, ManageEngine and WebNMS. At ManageEngine, we offer more than 90 products and free tools to help you manage all your IT operations, IT service management, IT Security, network& server, end user device management, etc. And we've built our tools from the ground up with contextual integration to make sure you can manage IT together.

We want to make IT simple. By that, we mean full functionality, everything you need, laid out in an userfriendly UI that won't make you want to throw your computer at the wall. On top of that, our applications are easy to download, install, configure, and deploy with no third-party support services or help needed. We call it instant gratification where the customer knows the value attached to the product – basically it is try it, before you buy it.

DQ: How should businesses approach digital transformation? Like when they are balancing between investing in any new technology and innovating?

Answer: The most important point is whatever digital transformation initiatives are taken, they will have to be looked at it from two perspectives. One is how they impact the topline and the bottomline. By topline, we mean it should help the business to attract new customers, retain the existing customers, upsell and cross-sell. If any of your initiatives are helping this, then that's a good one to invest in. Similarly, another way would be to increase the bottom line. Assume you do some process optimization, because of which cost comes down and the benefit of it goes to the bottom line. There are some very nice cases where you will be able to do a process optimization to take care of the bottom line, but it helps you in the top line.

For example, we had a case with a hotel. When the guests vacates the room, they will go to the front desk. The front desk will call up the cleaning services to say go and clean the room. Assume that when the front desk contacts the cleaning services, that person is not there because they're busy with some other thing. Creating a lag in the communication between the hotel departments.

One of the hotels has automated this whole process using our service desk solution. When the guest leaves the room, the notification automatically goes to the mobile of the cleaning department and the job is done.

DQ: What about the inventory?

Answer: In the process optimization step, where we help the cleaning person. We informed the inventory staff automatically, which is a process optimization step that helped us to take an asset, which would have been idle, back into circulation. It became a new revenue generation stream. So, whatever initiatives we do, we need to look at it from a perspective of how it affects both the top line and the bottom line.

DQ: What kind of obstacles are companies facing during digital transformation?

Answer: One of the key challenge is culture. By culture, we mean the willingness or the ability to try out new solutions. There has to be a willingness to try out new solutions. Digital transformation is all about taking the new technology and solving existing problems.

When you're initiating digital transformation, the people who are using it should be able to give feedback in a fearless manner. It would be good if the hierarchies are less, so that it's easier to talk to the stakeholders on what really is happening on the ground.

Then, the ability to work across silos. Any technology, especially the digital-based technologies, we are trying to apply to solve a problem. All these will succeed only if there is a lot of data. Each one of these technologies, when you apply to different departments, they generate a lot of data, only for you to be able to get these data together. You're able to break the silos and get the data together.

Hence to conclude the ability and the willingness to try out new solutions, give feedback, less hierarchical communication, work across silos, how agile practices, etc., are all very important things that help you in implementing digital initiatives.

DQ: Can you elaborate on culture and willingness? 

Answer: There are tools, and obviously, there is a culture. There are tools based on your culture. You will choose the tools that will have an impact on the culture. Example, WhatsApp. At a personal level, suddenly, WhatsApp is able to help you to be in touch with a lot of people, make people know about your opinions, make an informed decision, and all that.

Now, just imagine a similar thing in the organization. It doesn't have to be the same WhatsApp, but there are lots of tools available outside, which help you to have this kind of free flow communication within an organization. Slack, Yammer etc., are similar tools. These kind of tools help you to break the hierarchy, communication digital chat interfaces, and digital bulletin boards, digital forums, and digital white boarding. All these are kinds of tools help you to interface across various departments. It's not really a hierarchy, it's also across departments.

Let's take another simple example. Assume, an office is expanding into a new building. For which you need to talk to the legal team, the HR team, the functional head, etc. One way of interaction is: you can send a mail thread, wait for the replies to come back. But, that's not how you do in the personal world. You will take WhatsApp, and create a group for five members. It's like planning for an outing. You don't take up the phone and call up five people for planning outing or you don't put them in a conference room. You just create a Whatsapp group with these five people being a part of it. A similar experience can be given even within an organization.

Shailesh Davey, Co-Founder and Engineering – Head, ManageEngine

In an organization, we create a channel and include all these five people. Then you ask the questions. What earlier would have taken a day or two to get the feedback, now it will happen in real-time. Hence, there are challenges in implementing new technology. But, you just need to be open to them and bring a change in the culture.

DQ: What about capabilities like user entity, behavior analytics, personal data protection, blended data analytics that can help businesses?

Answer: One thing is very clear: whenever you undergo digital transformation, lots of data is generated in real-time. Nowadays, companies use the data for two-three things. One is to look at how they performed in the past. We can also look at it through predictive analytics about the future. You can also want in terms of anomalies, if something goes wrong. All this data that is generated, you can apply predictive rules, insight rules, anomaly rules, and gather a lot of insights out of it.

E.g. how many people would I need to address this problem, or how many extra parts do we need in supply chain?

But, for this to happen, the data that is there and multiple applications used by various people in multiple departments are allowed to be sucked in together. So, that's where this blended analytics comes into analytics, and all this will happen in the near future. Analytics is very crucial.

Along with data comes security and privacy. Now that you gathered so much data, you need to worry about the following things:

• Are you securely storing these data?
• Are you encrypting them?
• Is the right person accessing it?

You want the right person to access the right information, at the right time. To ensure that you need to have the tools and security policies that enable all this. Now that they've collected data and encrypted securely. You also need to worry about privacy. You need to know you are collecting a lot of data for the customers and the customers want to know if their data is not misused. All these go hand in hand.

DQ: What is the product and business growth in India?

Answer: We are growing at around 40% year-on-year. We have close to 3,000-4,000 customers across India. There are some big names like Reliance, RBL Bank, Bharat Petroleum and L&T etc. India is within the top five markets in the world in terms of revenues. There's a lot of focus in India. As a country, we are evolving. A similar thing happened in places like Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, etc. In all these countries, whenever the GDP increased, there's a lot of digital tools that are armed. That's what you're seeing, like you see the spend on digitization is on the higher side, plus regulations like GST, and some of the APS tax from the government enables all this. India is an extremely high priority market for us. We even set up a data center here.

DQ: What is the focus for this initiative?

Answer: We have seen good growth last year. We want to keep the pedal pressed. Now, data security and privacy is becoming extremely crucial. We will have a lot more products in these areas. We're also doubling up on our investments in some of the latest technologies, like AI/ML. All these will help add a lot of value to the customer.