ManageEngine delivers enterprise-grade, AI-enhanced IT management solutions that let you monitor, secure, and automate your entire IT infrastructure—from identity and access to endpoints and network operations—all from a unified platform. Trusted by global enterprises, it empowers IT teams to boost uptime, strengthen cybersecurity, and deliver seamless service experiences with ease.
In this episode of the SourceForge Podcast, we speak with Bharani Kumar, Head of Marketing at ManageEngine, a division of Zoho. The discussion covers ManageEngine’s role in IT management, offering comprehensive solutions for IT operations, cybersecurity, and endpoint management. Bharani highlights the company’s focus on integrating AI into their products, making enterprise-grade IT accessible and affordable. The conversation also touches on the company’s customer-first approach, support services, and the importance of privacy and security. Bharani shares insights on leadership qualities and emphasizes ManageEngine’s commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction.
Watch the podcast here:
Listen to audio only here:
Learn more about ManageEngine.
Interested in appearing on the SourceForge Podcast? Contact us here.
Show Notes
Takeaways
- IT is critical to business success.
- ManageEngine offers comprehensive IT management solutions.
- AI is now a standard feature in all products.
- User-friendliness is a core philosophy of ManageEngine.
- Customer support is essential for business success.
- Listening to team feedback is crucial for leaders.
- Effective communication is key in leadership.
- ManageEngine is a 100% bootstrap company.
- The company prioritizes customer privacy and security.
- Continuous innovation is necessary in the tech industry.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to ManageEngine and Its Mission
01:15 – The Evolution of ManageEngine
04:30 – Innovative Features in IT Management
10:52 – Balancing Power and Usability
12:27 – Customer Support and Success Stories
16:28 – Leadership Qualities in the Tech Industry
18:57 – Key Takeaways and Closing Thoughts
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:05)
Hello everyone and welcome to the theSourceForge Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions.
Today we’re joined by Bharani Kumar, Head of Marketing at ManageEngine Full Stack Observatory Solutions, the IT management division of Zoho Corporation that’s empowering over 280,000 organizations around the world to take control of their digital infrastructure. Whether it’s securing endpoints, managing networks, or streamlining service delivery, ManageEngine is on a mission to make enterprise-grade IT simple, affordable, and just accessible to companies of all sizes.
We’ll talk with Bharani about how ManageEngine stays ahead in this quickly changing tech landscape. We’ll talk about the company’s product philosophy and just how they’re helping IT teams navigate this complex AI revolution we’re in, as well as zero-trust security.
So Bharani, welcome to the podcast. Glad you could join us.
Bharani Kumar (01:03)
Yeah, thank you, Beau. Thanks for having me here.
Beau Hamilton (01:06)
Of course. So I gave a really high level overview of the company, but you’re obviously the expert here. Can you give us the lowdown on what ManageEngine does and how it helps businesses keep their IT in check?
Bharani Kumar (01:18)
See, if you look today, IT has become very critical to business. So any impact on IT, you can see there’s a direct impact on the business as well. So if you look at IT, there are multiple components involved. So not just, it’s not like a one entity. So you have like lot of infrastructure is there. You have a lot of security policies is there. You have a lot of cloud infrastructure is there. And then you have lot of processes and practices in place. So, if anything could go wrong in IT and the chances of failure or the points of failure to put it correctly are more in terms of IT. So, if anything goes wrong, then there’s a direct impact on the business also.
So, this is where ManageEngine comes into the picture. So, we are one of the very few vendors in the market who provide comprehensive management solutions for a wide range of IT problems ranging from IT operations, service desk, cybersecurity, endpoint management, mobile device management, identity access management. So for every IT problem, we have a perfect solution in place that works out of the box and customers can write out straight away.
Beau Hamilton (02:29)
That’s great. So yeah, there’s a lot of moving pieces with the IT solutions and all the different problems that it’s presented, I suppose. And you offer an all in one platform with all these different tools. And now I want to go back a little bit. So I know that your, this division started back in 2002. Is that correct? And this was like when the internet was kind of first starting to get kind of mature beyond its early wild west.
Bharani Kumar (02:52)
Yes. See, originally the company was founded in 1996. Back then we were known as AdventNet, where we were developing EMS frameworks for technology for telecom vendors like Nortel, Cisco. And around 2002, 2000 timeframe where there was lot of networks, internet happening, we kind of started ManageEngine.
So around that point of time, we had players like Big Four who were like Microsoft, BMC, HP and IBM who were charging a premium for even for basic network monitoring. So since we had the EMS technology framework already, we were easily able to come up with point products like for network monitoring, for server monitoring, for application monitoring. Then slowly we started kind of branching out to desktop management, service desk, password management, active directory management, all these solutions.
And now if you look at over a period of like 20 years, all of our solutions have fully grown. We have like a comprehensive suite of solutions for observability for IT operations management, endpoint management, ITSM. So we have like a wide range of tools. In fact, we have more than 60 plus products available as of today and every year we are coming up with new products to solve the IT needs of our customers.
Beau Hamilton (4:16)
Yeah, what are some of the products you have created to address some of the challenges that are faced today? Because obviously we’re entering this AI space and there’s a lot of kind of security aspects and IT challenges surrounding that.
Bharani Kumar (04:29)
Yeah, so we have kind of, so I would give you two different answers. So there are lot of challenges with respect to managing your IT. IT in the sense like in terms of IT operations management, in terms of managing the security of endpoints and managing the cyber security itself is a huge task. So we have solutions ranging from IT operations management, our flagship product, OpManager Plus, solves the need of IT operations management and observability. And we have products for endpoint management, where we call this Endpoint Manager. And so we have like a wide range of tools that can solve the challenges of today’s enterprises.
And when it comes to AI, we have a central team for it called the Zia. So we call these Zoho Labs where we have Zia. So Zia is the homegrown AI capabilities of ManageEngine. So every product has AI inbuilt now. So we kind of analyze the root cause or we do give some predictions, we give some forecasting capabilities and we also take some self-healing actions, especially in terms of IT operations management suite of solutions.
So every solution has AI inbuilt now and AI is kind of basic functionality now. It’s no more a high-end feature.
Beau Hamilton (05:52)
Interesting. I really, I think it stands out the fact that you said every product and solution you offer has AI built in, in some way, shape or form. That’s pretty, that’s pretty incredible. Yeah, we’re kind of moving on past that whole, like it’s a shiny new feature and now it’s just common place. You kind of have to have it nowadays.
But yeah, that’s great to hear you’re staying on top of things in the AI department. I know you really have to keep innovating in this space. You really can’t just remain idle and wait for things to play out.
Now, Bharani, I know one of the most appealing aspects of any IT platform is its ability to integrate with other existing tools and services, right? Can you talk about how ManageEngine integrates with other platforms and why that’s so important for your clients?
Bharani Kumar (06:38)
Yeah, so if you look at any IT team will have like n number of tools in place and we make sure that our products are kind of fitting into their ecosystem so that they really find the answers from our tools and that could be sometime the missing piece of the puzzle. So we make sure that we try to integrate with as many vendors as possible and this is primarily driven by our customers also.
So some customers ask us for any particular integration with any vendor. And we also have a product management team who kind of does the research and finds value when we integrate with any other vendor. So we make sure that we are able to fit into the existing suite of customer solutions. And if you look at, in ManageEngine itself, we have over 60 plus products. So we make sure that all our products first integrate with each of them. So we make sure that our products integrate with our suite of solutions first. And secondly, we also make sure that we integrate with some of the prominent other vendors in the market so that our customers can able to pull data from our solutions and put it into the other vendor and viceversa.
Beau Hamilton (07:51)
That’s great. Yeah. That’s like when I’m a customer shopping for, I don’t know. Well, actually my mind goes to the smartphones and the thinking about different closed source operating systems and more open operating systems like Android and the more options, the better. So appreciate that. Yeah.
So I want to go back again to the products you offer and have available. So ManageEngine, you offer the IT operations management suite, right? For IT teams? And this essentially helps various, offers various services all in one place. I imagine there are constant features and updates being rolled out, but what are some of the most exciting new features users should know about?
Bharani Kumar (08:35)
Yeah, so some of the latest features which will be very exciting for our customers are the Zia Dashboard that, we call it as Zia dashboard. So the dashboard basically tells you what are the problems that are currently going on and what could be the reason behind these kind of problems and what kind of corrective steps or remediation they should take. And we also have some actionable links directly given in the dashboard.
So, say for example, there is an outage in a small branch office network. And so, the recommendation would be to check into the recent configurations because the AI program will know that this recent configuration change that happened which could have triggered the issue. So, the remediation would be to roll back the configuration. And since our IT management suite of solutions has both monitoring as well as management capabilities, we could able to easily roll out the configuration change within a click of a button. So this kind of feature will instantly help customers to resolve problems like outages and other performance issues in just a matter of minutes. So this is one of the cool features that we have built.
And also based on AI, we are giving some forecasting alerts, especially in terms of utilization. Say for example, you have a storage device and that is kind of like we will predict that when it is going to near its full capacity and based on that we will give you some predictive alerts so that you can add more arrays or disks and then prevent it from an outage or like being overloaded. So this is another feature.
And then we have a feature for root cause analysis. So that you could kind of stack all the performance metrics and find out what exactly is the problem that is triggering this issue or outage something like that.
So these are some of the major features that we are building and apart from that we are also trying to have like a org map especially for the observability feature. So in this org map we will kind of like give the relationship map right from applications to down to the network level and in between. So if you’re doing any change or if there is any problem, you could easily figure out like what are the devices that is going to impact or what are the devices that got impacted, and when you kind of upgrade or do the change, can notify all the stakeholders before changing anything. So these kind of features are something which I can see that our customers are kind of very excited when they hear about this.
Beau Hamilton (11:05)
Yeah, definitely. I mean, you have all these different moving parts with an IT system. And so yeah, it makes sense you have all these different features to address them and help teams keep on track and make sure everything’s humming appropriately, humming along.
So now you have all these features. Obviously, you mentioned coming down the pipeline. Some are here already, of course and there’s more competitors and tools, it seems like, available for IT teams and systems to become more nimble and independent at the same time. So you have this competition, right?
So how do you strike the right balance between making ManageEngine maybe super powerful while also keeping it easy to use and affordable and enticing for new customers?
Bharani Kumar (11:52)
See that is the very fundamental philosophy of ManageEngine. So we want all our products to be extremely user friendly, simple and at the same time it should be mostly affordable also. So how do we do it is because we kind of keep our marketing expenses very minimum. So we kind of invest very less in marketing but we invest more in terms of research and development. And we have lot of centralized teams which create functionality, say for example, like a framework, like our AI team.
So we have like centralized teams through which we could be able to kind of share the development work and that gives us to stay kind of like keep our operational expenses pretty low. And as a result, we are able to pass on this benefit to our customers and keep our products more affordable. But at the same time, we have like dedicated development teams which focus deep into the feature or functionality development of every of our products. So this way we could able to keep our products rich in terms of features yet stay affordable.
Beau Hamilton (12:59)
Right. Yeah. You really let the products kind of speak for itself just in terms of features and capabilities. What kind of support do you offer to help IT teams get the most out of your platform? Because believe it or not, IT teams need IT support as well.
Bharani Kumar (13:15)
Yeah, so this is again one of the again like very core principles of our company. So we want our customers to stay happy. We want our customers to be our advocates and take and spread the positive message about our products. So we basically we offer a chat, email and phone support.
And we also have like extensive documentation videos, self-helping portals where customers by themselves could troubleshoot the problems. But if they want to reach out to any professional help, they could always reach out via phone, chat or email.
Beau Hamilton (13:51)
Great. That’s good to hear. Cause yeah. I mean, any customer support is the backbone of really any business. It seems like, like when I’m evaluating a new business to work with, you know, whether it’s like contractors working around my home or if it’s software related, I do, I often look into the customer support, aspect and obviously you get good feedback and good reviews, based off the customer support you’re able to receive, right?
Bharani Kumar (14:18)
Yeah. So we also have like dedicated teams working on different time zones. Since we have a global customer base, so we have a technical support team working around the clock all through the week. So we make sure that we attend to our customers request within the shortest span of time.
Beau Hamilton (14:36)
Very good, very reassuring. That’s good to hear. Now, do you have any particular example of how ManageEngine went above and beyond for a particular customer? Maybe it was during a critical incident or a complex deployment process. Just curious to see if you have an example to share with us.
Bharani Kumar (14:55)
Yeah, so we have one of the major banks in India. So where support team kind of like stretched hours even during the weekends to help them with their implementation and any small feature request that they thought it is very critical for their business, we kind of like took an additional effort to build that feature and give it to the customer so that they really find value in our solutions. So this is one of the largest bank. And similarly, we had a customer in the US where they are one of the government organizations where unfortunately during the upgrade because of their internal infrastructure, they had a small issue. And then where our technicians had to sit through continuous calls and try to have some remote sessions and fix the issue.
So as I said before, so we are a customer first company. So we kind of follow this approach. So we, in fact, for every customer, we kind of go to the extreme level that is possible from our side to make sure that the customer is happy.
Beau Hamilton (15:57)
That’s good. That’s good. Yeah. I know. So if you’re working with the government or in the banking sectors, you obviously have to have a really kind of ironclad IT systems. So those are good examples, I would say.
So my next question is a little bit of pivot. It’s more to talk, and kind of ask you about your maybe experience working in the industry, but feel free to apply it to the company level as well. But, yeah, based off your experience, working with ManageEngine, or previous experience. I’m just curious, what are some qualities you would say are essential for maybe someone or a business aspiring to be a leader in today’s business world?
Bharani Kumar (16:37)
Yeah, see based on my experience, I would say as a leader, you need to have few essential qualities. So first one I would say is to be an avid listener. So you should really listen to what your team is saying because they are the person who actually talk to the customers. They are the person who talk to the vendors. They are the person who talk to the partners. So first of all, you should be an avid listener to understand what is the ground reality.
Second one, you should be an excellent communicator. So you should be able to communicate the vision of you or the company to the fellow teammates so that they also are in sync with what the vision is. And then they should take it forward.
And then you should be a team player. So you should not like simply like assign everything to the team and you can be rest assured that, okay, the team will take care of it, but you need to be really involved hands on to understand the challenges that the team is facing and probably step in, help them, guide them and be a proper mentor.
Beau Hamilton (17:34)
I like that. Yeah. I really would like to underscore the communication aspect because it’s almost a cliche at this point because everyone mentions it when it’s relationships or personal or work relationships. But yeah, communication is huge, right? And I think, you know, one way of communicating that is often overlooked nowadays is just face to face communication. And I mean, the next best thing is kind of this digital, meeting up digitally in these digital spaces.
But yeah, thanks for sharing. That’s really, that’s great advice, I would say. Now, for listeners, is there one maybe key takeaway you would recommend, whether it be for ManageEngine or maybe just some life advice, kind of like what you talked about with the qualities? Is there a key takeaway you have in mind that you’d like to share with us?
Bharani Kumar (18:24)
So the key takeaway for ManageEngine is that like we are one of the very few software vendors in the market today who offer a very broad portfolio of products and who follow a very customer-first approach. And at the same time, we also give more importance to privacy and security. So we unnecessarily don’t collect data from our customers. And we also don’t sell any data of our customers to other vendors or other companies. So all our products are like extremely user friendly. And we are 100% bootstrap company.
So that gives us the freedom to focus more on the products rather than worrying about the financial quarters. So we really want to satisfy our customers. We constantly talk to our customers, understand what is their requirement and try to make sure that that gets implemented in the next release or the release after that. And all our products are like super easy to use, scalable and more affordable.
Beau Hamilton (19:25)
That’s a great answer. Yeah, you did a good job with my question, my on the spot question without much preparation there. So nice job there. Yeah, I think the privacy aspect is something that’s often overlooked, right?
So my last question for you, Bharani, for those interested, where can people learn more about ManageEngine and get in touch with you and your team?
Bharani Kumar (19:44)
Yeah. So, if someone wants to know more about our products, so they can visit our website, www.manageengine.com. And we are available on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. So you could find a lot more about our products through these channels. If you want to directly get in touch with our product teams, then customers, they can shoot a mail to sales@manageengine.com.
Beau Hamilton (20:11)
Perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. That’s Bharani Kumar, Head of Marketing at ManageEngine Full Stack Observability solutions. Thank you for taking the time to sit down and talk with us.
Bharani Kumar (20:21)
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Beau. Thanks for having me at your show. It was nice talking to you.
Beau Hamilton (20:27)
Of course. Thank you all for listening to theSourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I’ll talk to you in the next one.