Chapter 5:
The road ahead

Focusing on the future requires asking ourselves important questions that could define (or redefine) our path.

1. Is ManageEngine a future-ready enterprise?

The IT landscape is ever-changing. Business environments are never the same. The pandemic taught us that you can really work from anywhere and still have the protection of your IT systems. At ManageEngine, we've continued to invest in these areas to help customers be prepared for the future.

Looking back, we've invested in features and services long before they became trends. Being able to provide options like cloud services to customers, emphasizing data privacy in our business model (before the GDPR made the headlines), and focusing on remote security of the system. These are things we have worked on and will continue to work on in order to improve business efficiency and prevent them from posing a challenge to customers. In short, yes. ManageEngine is a future-ready enterprise.

2. How do we encourage inclusivity with talent?

Zoho Corp has always encouraged expanding operations beyond metropolitan cities, even more so since the pandemic. At the time of writing, we have set up 35 spoke offices across India to embrace rural revitalization. The primary criteria for hiring at these offices is local talent, young adults with the passion for innovation who wouldn't get these opportunities otherwise. We've also learned to look past educational qualifications and assess their application skills in real life through projects. We've come across dozens of youngsters with limited qualifications who have studied at Zoho Schools and prove themselves capable of crafting world-class products, a discovery we wouldn't have made if we had focused on resumes.

3. Where do we see ourselves 10 years down the line?

At a 2022 user conference, Shailesh Davey, vice president of engineering, talked about the future of IT. "Whenever the number of three-lettered and four-lettered acronyms is increasing, it means that concept is becoming mainstream. A few years ago, there was only one acronym: WFO. Then we had WFH, WFN, WFA, and we also have WFB: work from bed," he jokes. The biggest takeaway, he believes, is that customers are going digital-first and employees are going remote-first. That is the future of work. And while it's impossible to predict what exactly the IT landscape would look like, we can take steps to invest in strategies that we believe will make a difference.

Over the next few years, ManageEngine will be focusing on remote-cloud and on-premise-cloud solutions. If you compare our product portfolio against zoho.com, you might notice a few similarities. For instance, ManageEngine's Analytics Plus and Zoho Analytics or AppCreator and Zoho Creator. It's not a coincidence. The aim here is to support both forms of deployment.

The underlying framework for these hybrid-cloud solutions is the same. These frameworks are built in-house, from scratch, in a way that they can be customized to meet cloud or on-premises requirements. The hybrid-cloud solutions will be made available across as many products as possible to give customers flexibility and control over their data, or as Sridhar Vembu likes to say, ensure customers don't feel over-clouded.

4. How does ManageEngine define growth? What can we anticipate next?

As we mark twenty years, we acknowledge our development from being point product vendors to diversifying into a suite of contextually integrated products that deliver unified, end-to-end services. We take pride in dogfooding or being customer zero. We've built our own frameworks (and more in the works) to strengthen the foundation of our solutions. Following suit, the look and feel of our products have seen their fair share of changes, too. Our customers wanted tools that were minimalistic and user-friendly—so that's how we designed our tools.

ManageEngine started in a small office in South India. Today, we see exponential growth in our technology that enables work from any part of the world. Teams collaborate securely and deliver services to customers without any hassle. As we continue down this path, we aim to become the standard for enterprise IT management and bridge the gap between business and IT operations.

As far as internal growth is concerned, Rajesh shares his observation. He concludes that ManageEngine has evolved over the years in five eras or levels of transformation:

• Engineering: For the first four years, we were an engineering-based company through and through. Our DNA was engineering. Decisions were made by engineers based on engineering factors and they didn't give much importance to anything else.
• Product management: After we laid a stable foundation, we focused on how customers would use the product, if it would solve their top five pain points, how intuitive it would be—things like that.
• Marketing: It took a long time for marketing to become a focal point. In the early stages, marketing was just putting the product out there on the internet, paying for Adwords and calling it a day. It took us a while to really understand the customer, localize our products, and work with partners.
• UI and design: In the mid-2000s, Apple introduced minimalistic designs and changed how devices look. Around the same time, we started working on the aesthetics and usability of our products. Having a product that just does the job isn't enough, it has to look and feel good, too.
• Service: In 2022, we announced the expansion of our workforce by hiring 1,000 people in India, mostly for customer-facing roles like support. Our leaders firmly believe we need to invest heavily in support so our customers have a reliable partner to navigate a fast-changing landscape.

Twenty years later, we can proudly say our DNA is a blend of each aspect of business.

While we can't say for sure, delivering a personalized customer experience is taking precedence and may very well be the next level of transformation. Zoho Corp has a business solutions team dedicated to working with customers and ensuring solutions are implemented the right way. We also have a customer education team (that's us!) to talk about how we use our own tools to streamline our IT processes. ManageEngine is also working on launching a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) program shortly to facilitate customer interaction, understand industry challenges across the world and determine how ManageEngine can align its solutions to alleviate their day-to-day IT problems.

Conclusion

ManageEngine has had a remarkable journey. In two decades, we have carved a niche for ourselves in the global enterprise IT management market as an emerging leader and a supporter of small businesses. Millions of admins and technicians worldwide trust us and our tightly-knit suite of products to manage their IT. From one product to 120 and from ten to over 10,000 employees, we've witnessed phenomenal growth and a legacy in the making. All of this was made possible by a young group of engineers who, twenty years ago, decided to come together and made their mark on the Indian IT landscape.

Twenty years down and we're just getting started.

About the author

Mahanya is a content specialist here at ManageEngine. She has been a part of ManageEngine Academy since 2020, sharing in- house stories and resources for IT leaders. When she isn’t creating content, she spends time with rescue dogs.