Chapter 2:
ManageEngine's transformation from a product into a brand
ManageEngine: Our first pivot
A lesser known fact about us is that ManageEngine was initially the name of a product. The late 90s was when people experienced the internet for the first time. (Remember dial-up internet?) Telecom companies needed data centers and hardware infrastructure to host websites. They would reach out to managed service providers (MSPs) to purchase the hardware and software to manage them. ManageEngine was initially built as a solution for MSPs to monitor their network equipment. Needless to say, it was a niche market with intense competition. As technology developed over the next few years, the market collapsed.
After the failure of ManageEngine (the product), we realized: when you sell to a specific market, you will not be in business for the long run. We needed to realign our goal and sell to every business that used technology. Since we had roots in telecom network management, we had the commonality of domain knowledge and technology to move forward with a network manager solution. However, when OpManager launched, we were unable to hit the ground running. With OpManager as our only product, it was hard to garner faith and prove ourselves as potential players in the market. We reached out to our WebNMS resellers hoping to continue our partnership and promote OpManager and its services. Unfortunately, none of them were interested.
We continued to work on OpManager with the support of a few who believed in AdventNet.
Soon enough, we released newer products covering the various aspects of IT management. Three years later, our WebNMS partners realized our potential and offered to work together again. Some of them are still with us.
Reinventing our identity
In the midst of our existential crisis, the CEO decided it was time to shake things up. Our intention when we entered the enterprise IT management sector was to cover the entire spectrum of the market. However, we didn't have much to offer back then. So, to play the IT game, we had to build.
We knew we had to build products—products that solved common pain points for many customers around the world. We already had WebNMS, which was a powerful platform to build complex network management systems. So, we leveraged it, created a stripped down version of that platform, on top of which we could build multiple products, to solve different enterprise IT management problems.
Product managers picked products based on their passion and expertise; having the base platform to build from along with the company's culture really helped us in releasing multiple products quickly. This also helped us stand up against competition like the Big4 of enterprise IT management and hundreds of vendors vying for the growing market.
One major hurdle we faced at this stage was establishing the fact that ManageEngine was not just one product. In a recent interview with Sridhar Iyengar (Head of ManageEngine Operations, Europe), he talked about the shift in perception from a single product to a global brand. He says, "When we started out, most of us in the company were engineers who didn't know much about branding or marketing. So, we started out doing what we knew best, which was building our products. What we realized over time, as we built and put out different products, customers would come back and say that the product names were emphasized more than the brand name."
Customers would often see themselves as OpManager customers or ServiceDesk Plus customers rather than seeing themselves as ManageEngine customers. That worked to our disadvantage because they didn't see us as a broad, all-encompassing brand. We decided to put more emphasis and energy behind unifying our products into one brand and providing a more unified experience across ManageEngine products.
In the long run, our efforts in communicating that brand value to customers have paid off. Customers might reach out in search of a help desk or network monitoring solution and soon realize that we have a lot more to offer. Eventually, they go through our product roster and adopt a number of solutions based on their needs.