What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Prioritizing What Matters: Why Customer Happiness Beats Ticket Counts
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
How do you measure customer happiness in IT support? Not by tickets closed, but by genuine success. This refreshing perspective from
Romanus Prabhu Raymond, Director of Technology for Endpoint Management and Security at ManageEngine, sets the tone for our deep dive into modern endpoint management challenges and solutions.
The conversation tackles the foundation of effective security: asset visibility. "If you don't know what you have, that's the biggest challenge," Romanos explains, highlighting how bringing dispersed assets into a single pane of glass creates immediate value for organizations struggling with distributed environments and remote workforces.
When it comes to AI, ManageEngine takes a distinctly pragmatic approach. Rather than treating AI as a checkbox feature, they integrate it to solve specific operational problems. Through a revealing anecdote about a CIO requesting "AI" without understanding its purpose, Romanos demonstrates how AI should enhance existing capabilities—like prioritizing patch management for vulnerable endpoints based on their exposure level and business risk—instead of being deployed for its own sake.
The discussion explores the dramatic evolution of endpoint management over the past 15 years, from single agents to today's complex ecosystem of legacy machines, modern devices, BYOD policies, and IoT devices. This transformation creates substantial skill gaps and management challenges that ManageEngine addresses through automation and visibility tools that reduce IT burden while improving security outcomes.
Perhaps most compelling is ManageEngine's customer-centric culture, which spans their global operations through what they call "translocalization"—combining local cultural understanding with core corporate values. This approach ensures consistent, high-quality support tailored to regional expectations while maintaining their foundational commitment to customer success.
Ready to transform how you manage and secure your digital assets? Discover the practical strategies and tools that leading organizations are implementing to stay ahead of evolving threats while reducing operational complexity.
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And I'm here at the ManageEngine user conference with Romance Last day of the conference here, Great to see you. What an amazing couple of days. Before we jump in, maybe introduce yourself, your mission within ManageEngine and initial takeaways.
Speaker 2:All right, Thanks for having me. My name is Romanos Prabhu-Raymond. Thanks, you got my name right and I work as a director of technology for endpoint management and security line of products. My primary focus is basically keeping my customers happy, Right from pre-sales delivery, onboarding and ensuring that they are procuring more management products and they are happy. That's my portfolio and we also recommend solutions, technology to the customers and also internally take that input and bring it to the development team so that we are in power with the customer's expectation in real time and make sure that it's happening.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and speaking of making customers happy great goal, simple with the customer's expectation in real time and make sure that it's happening. Fantastic and speaking of making customers happy, great goal, simple. What's changed the most in customer expectations the last weeks, months, years, in your opinion?
Speaker 2:You have to prove in at least one area where he feels that it is essential that he trusts that, Say. Most of them would say that I don't have visibility of my assets. It could be a huge organization, distributed, multiple remote offices and if you are able to bring to the single pane of glass where are the assets, what are the assets, who owns that assets and what are the vulnerabilities in those assets? That's really important. When you bring that first, the customers are actually happy because once you know what you have, you can prepare yourself to protect and secure them. If you don't know what you have, then that's the biggest challenge.
Speaker 1:Great point. And, of course, ai is everywhere now lots of media hype and other hype. You have a very, I think, pragmatic or practical approach to AI. Talk about that and the way it's reshaping, the way you support customers and deliver solutions. Okay.
Speaker 2:So we had a funny incident in Asia where one of the CIO approached sales and sales brought him to me and he was saying I have budget, now I need AI. Now that's not. Ai is going to work. So we understand AI better. So that means what Rajesh was talking in his presentation, so everything is going to be functional. So if I have to achieve patch management, the patch management has to be achieved. For that, what the solution has to be given is given.
Speaker 2:Now, how do you do the patching? So, unless you understand this better, you will not be able to add further technology to that. So the patching is done based on the severity. Who gives the severity? The vendor gives the severity and it is done based on the severity. Who gives the severity? The vendor gives the severity and it is done based on the CVSS scores from various reasons how exploitable, how easy that to exploit? Based on various factors. The severity is given.
Speaker 2:Now, as a customer, what you do is you take the patches based on the severity and deploy it to your endpoints. You schedule it or push it when they are alive. Now, what is AI here? So, if you understand this better, what you can do is you have your fleet of endpoints out of 1000, say, for example, 50 are always on the road on the go right Now. As far as a customer is concerned, his endpoints which are away from the secured perimeter is actually most vulnerable. So I understand my vulnerable endpoints as a customer and then I understand what are the severity, so what is outside exploitable, and I should be prioritizing that for the patch management as a first type, and then I can think about the ones which are inside your physical security perimeter, which means adding AI to understand the behavior and exposure of the endpoint and accordingly prioritize based on the business risk.
Speaker 2:What I have Now. This is how we do it with every module. So we have the functionality like patching or vulnerability scanner, and based on that, based on the real-time use case, real-time exposure of the endpoint, based on the risk, we prioritize. And that's where AI and ML comes in and helps out. So this is how, organically, at the operation level, we have the AI data so that you should be able to make better decisions.
Speaker 1:Wow, it's really powerful. So here at the user conference, I mean, customer education has been everywhere. I feel like I've gotten an amazing education over the last day or two. I'm not even a customer, but support is the flip side of customer education as well. When it comes to both, what are you seeing customers struggling with most right now and how are you navigating through that?
Speaker 2:Okay, there are a lot of priorities for the customer. Right One we have a lot of technologies coming in right. I know people who have been using the product for 10, 12, 15 years. By then he was a technician, now he's a senior manager or something like that. Now, in this 15 years, the way that he was managing the endpoint has dramatically changed. Earlier it was only a single agent which was managing the endpoint and then we had multiple agents. That's the biggest headache. So you have one for AV, you have one for patching, you have one for vulnerability assessment, many and what happened?
Speaker 2:The way they manage itself changed from mobile device management, enterprise mobility management, unified endpoint management. Now we talk about autonomous endpoint management. So in the short period of time 15 to 20 years there are a lot of technology which has to be adapted and I should say the older technology is not out. Still. People have legacy machines, modern devices, bring your own devices, iot devices. The challenge here is for the customer put together. He has to manage the technology for the number of endpoints or number of assets, what they have. So different technology, different form feeders, different way of management, and in between this there is as you mentioned, there is always a skill gap. You have to keep yourself upgraded. So their expectation is if the product could be on its own, bringing visibility, doing a lot of things on its own, based on approval, then that's what makes it easy for him to manage and secure the endpoints or the assets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really compelling. Let's talk about customer success. The usual way you mentioned customer success is number of tickets closed, which is getting a little out of date, old fashioned. How do you think about success in this new era of user expectations, user experience, et cetera?
Speaker 2:So we have dedicated customer success managers. We ensure that the single motto or target. What I give my managers is ensure that your customers are happy. How do you measure happy? It's based on the success how successful they are in achieving what they actually came in for and what they have additionally achieved through this. We have seen the measurement. What we have is people would actually replace multiple products which they have been using over the years to do some regular management and security for various reasons, would be replaced by endpoint central. Now that's how we measure success. That's how we measure success in ManageEngine. So, from one point, based on the experience, he will go with the next point and when you have multiple products, at a user conference like this, he would come and explain about the enterprise-level challenges and how the product would be able to align with his views and have a better third-party ecosystem to solve all his problems. So that's how we see customer success, not in terms of number of tickets or the ratings that he gives.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I love the approach. So you're known for having teams all over the world, from the US here, of course, India, locally, globally. It's quite an interesting model. How are you seeing the approach to hybrid work in this new norm of remote work, hybrid work Lots of considerations from cultural to support, security implications from working from home. I imagine cultural differences are also shaping the support experience. How are you thinking about the future, I guess, when it comes to support?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Sridhar talks about Rajesh talks about translocalization. That's where we have people locally available and I don't see that as a flip side. I see that as a positive way, an encouraging way, because the person who's in the US, particularly in this state, understands what is the culture here, what is the expectation, and what we have to do is just pass on the corporate culture, what we have. So customer comes first, data privacy. We ensure technology, whatever it takes. We have to ensure the customer is happy. So we have to attend to the customer as priority, ensure that his problems are heard. Now, when this kind of culture is passed on from us to the local companies hiring here, so they ensure that culture here is adapted along with the culture, what we have for the customer success. I don't think that's a challenge and so far, wherever we go let it be Latin America, us, middle East, asia, pacific we are successful with such an approach where people are actually taking culture, zoho's culture, ManageEngine's culture and ensuring that they are propagating that with very good vibe locally here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting. And speaking of culture, you have a quite unique culture at Zoho and ManageEngine and there are different views about the future of IT support. Some see complete, more automation, others see more human touch. Correct, where do you lie in that continuum? I think you're somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So as a vendor, as partners with the enterprise customers, we want to ensure, whichever way they want to go, we have that enabled in the product. We want to stay relevant. That's what our CEOs would say. Stay relevant to customers' requirements. So that's the most important thing. So, which means if they want to completely automate, yes, we have that capability in the product which can do the complete automation autonomous. And now, if you want to have human-in-loop ensure that it's happening, yes, that is also possible. So that's a kind of approach that our leadership team would always prefer and I think we are in that direction.
Speaker 1:That's great. So we're wrapping up here. Besides getting some rest after quite a hectic week, what are you looking forward to next? What's on your radar as you head into the next weeks and months?
Speaker 2:Okay. So, officially, we have to do a lot of follow-ups. You see, here we have close to 500 plus footfall and there are a lot of requirements, a lot of requests, a lot of commitments that we have made. So getting this started and ensuring communicating back to the customer, ensuring that things are happening, is the first priority, and then, of course, we have our own list of things to do in terms of getting engagement with the customers and schedules like this.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, congratulations on all the success onwards and upwards. Yeah, thank you. Thanks so much and thanks everyone for listening and watching. Take care.