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?
How ManageEngine is Navigating the AI Revolution While Staying True to Its Founding Values
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Rajesh Ganesan's journey from programmer to CEO of ManageEngine spans 23 remarkable years of technological disruption and business transformation. What began in 1996 as a programming role at AdvenNet evolved into leading a global IT management powerhouse after a pivotal 2001 pivot that saw the birth of ManageEngine.
The secret to ManageEngine's enduring success? A steadfast commitment to founding principles that might seem counterintuitive in today's hyper-growth tech landscape. "We are not starting this business to have any quick exit," Ganesan explains, highlighting their decision to remain completely bootstrapped despite numerous opportunities for external investment. This independence has allowed them to answer only to employees and customers, build their entire technology stack in-house, and make unconditional promises about data privacy they can actually keep.
While artificial intelligence dominates today's tech conversations, Ganesan maintains a refreshingly pragmatic perspective: "AI is not magic. You need good data infrastructure and discipline in how you define processes." Rather than simply rebranding as an "AI company," ManageEngine has invested heavily in building domain-specific language models through their dedicated Labs team, focusing on practical applications that solve real business problems without compromising data sovereignty. This approach addresses the three critical challenges facing today's IT leaders: workforce reskilling amid technological disruption, the overwhelming proliferation of specialized tools creating management nightmares, and ever-present cybersecurity threats that could strike "anytime, from any direction."
Looking ahead, ManageEngine is focusing on unifying their 60+ products into a cohesive platform experience, enhancing everything with AI capabilities that deliver tangible business impact, and addressing growing data sovereignty challenges as countries implement stricter regulations. With seventeen user conferences planned worldwide in 2025, they remain committed to understanding and addressing global customer needs while staying true to the founding principles that have guided their successful journey for over two decades. Want to learn more about how ManageEngine can simplify your IT management? Visit our website to explore our complete solution portfolio.
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Rajesh, great seeing you here on the last day of the user conference. What a couple of days, really extraordinary energy and so much content. Before that, maybe introduce yourself and your incredible journey over two decades with ManageEngine.
Speaker 2:Thank you, ivan. Thanks for being here, thanks for this opportunity. I am Rajesh Ganesan. I'm the CEO of ManageEngine. My journey starts from day one of ManageEngine. I started as a programmer in 1996. The company we were called AdvenNet. Then we had a good business going, building software platform for managing telco infrastructure. But, as things would have it, we had to pivot around 2001, two times. When we saw this opportunity we could enter and disrupt the IT management market. This is pre-cloud days. That is how Manage Engine was started With the vision of solving this problem by building products that would go global.
Speaker 2:From day one, the vision was to solve the IT management problem end-to-end and solve it globally. We started with a couple of products in the first year, so took the products around the world, listened to the customers. We have stayed customer-centric and the evolution over the last 23 years has been fantastic. Here we are still staying relevant. We have seen disruptions come and go. Disruptions come and stay. Disruptions come and make an impact. Things like cloud to virtualization, to mobile, to now the AI wave. We are proud of the long journey, staying relevant, still solving customers' business problems. So happy to be here even.
Speaker 1:It's amazing that journey, which is, you know, that long journey, so relevant and still innovating. What's been the secret in such a fast moving, dynamic, changing marketplace over those two decades?
Speaker 2:I mean it always goes back to the founding values which we keep talking about, because technology is an easier problem to solve right. So, as we always were very clear, so we are not starting this business to have any quick exit. We always wanted to start from our deep understanding of the customer problems, our understanding of what technology makes it possible. How do we best apply to solve those problems right. So that is number one. Number two we always had this long-term thinking, so we are not in this to grow inorganically or see easy exits, which is why we never took external capital completely bootstrapped company.
Speaker 2:We build our complete technology stack and we do this for reasons like when we write terms of service and give it as a commitment to our customers. We want to stay true to that. So we don't want to be dependent on other third parties, other companies. Our terms of service say, for example, data privacy. How do we handle customer data? If that is a promise we give to our customers, we have to be 100% sure. So, whether it is our cloud infrastructure, our on-premises products, we go the extra mile to make sure the entire stack is ours, entire infrastructure is ours. The data, customer's data stays only within our infrastructure. So this is not really any secret sauce. Even these are some of the founding principles that guide us even today, right? So stay private. Be answerable only to the employees and the customers. Right, never be under pressure to show financial results. Always have this positive pressure of showing good impact to customers.
Speaker 1:Right, these are values that drive us and that has made us build all these products and stay relevant till this date is build all these products and stay relevant till this date, wonderful, and AI and automation have been on top of mind here, on everyone's mind this week, and it's indeed touching every product from ManageEngine Right, maybe talk about how you're weaving AI into the portfolio At a high level.
Speaker 2:We do believe the AI technology that we have today is really really very productive and useful. It's gone beyond a point. You cannot say no to AI anymore. It is useful, but at the same time, we are also very over-promising. So like AI is going to take care of everything for you magically, so we go to the basics, to the first principles. Ai is not magic. You need to have good data infrastructure. You need to have good discipline about how you define and run your processes. So we apply the same here. So we understand how our customers across verticals operate, how their infrastructure works, and we know how our products sit in that infrastructure. So we are not jumping to call. Manageengine is suddenly becoming an AI company, right. So we will always be this company that focuses on solving customers' business problem, but, at the same time, absolutely understand the power and the possibilities that AI brings in. How do we give this massive AI boost to the managed engine platform? This is how our approach has been for the last three years.
Speaker 2:I also spoke about our commitment to building our own stack. So we are investing heavily, building our own language models. So apply to specific business problems like IT management or cybersecurity or compliance. So these are the things that we do, because, when it comes to AI, the biggest problem or concern that customers have is where does my data go? To which LLM sitting where? So you also are having all these local regulations on data sovereignty all of that. So we have a different approach. Even with AI, we think end-to-end. We build and own our complete stack and all of our products, whether it is conversational intelligence or talk about agentic AI, which brings intelligent, autonomous automation, prediction intelligence All of that.
Speaker 2:We are building our own models. We have a separate team inside a managed engine called the managed engine labs. A lot of investments go there. They work on creating breakthroughs. How can we best apply models in the domain of cybersecurity? Those breakthroughs will find their way into each of our products. Could be our endpoint management and security, could be our security information and log management or our identity access management. This has been our approach. This has proven very successful so far.
Speaker 2:We're already able to build and deliver use cases that our customers want using AI. It is not AI completely solving all the problems they tell us, especially in this user conference. Some of the customers are super excited looking at what is coming. An example is like today, if you want to build a workflow, you can just draw this and supply a JPEG or a PDF into our product service displace. It can build and automate the workflow. So these are things that we are focused on building. It is not about AI. It is about building and executing the workflows right. That's the focus area, but bring the power of AI. So this approach is what we will continue to go with Fantastic.
Speaker 1:As you hear from your customers here, so many IT leaders, it teams have tremendous challenges in doing more with less skill set challenges. But what are you hearing as some of the biggest pain points for enterprise IT leaders at the moment?
Speaker 2:Exactly, you hit the nail right there. The first problem today is because, let's face it, ea is staring upon all of us. It is, like I said, bringing a lot of new possibilities, new way of doing things, even though the problems that you want to solve remain the same. This reskilling your current workforce is a big problem today, given all the uncertainties that it comes with AI brings with. Will I have my job today? Ai is, of course, going to take over a lot of jobs. Right, it is able to generate code. That is definitely much, much better. It is able to give you great content. It is able to look into huge volumes of data, run analytics, give you insights. So these are some of the areas that will have a big impact. So, when I talk to IT leaders, one of the biggest concern is they have their team. They are not as willing to face this situation head on. They are not ready to upskill or reskill themselves. There is a sort of entitlement to people. I've done this for 20 years, right, and this is I know better. This is how I want to continue doing. That's not the case. So I can say from my personal experience, every three, four years, regardless of age, every three, four years. We have had to reinvent ourselves as a company. I have had to reinvent myself as a person of what I could do. You could choose to be a programmer for 30, 40 years right, but that's your choice. But if you want to navigate disruptions, if you want to move up the value chain, so companies, it leaders, technology leaders especially domains like cybersecurity are compliance you are not able to find right expertise, right skill, people wanting to move up that direction.
Speaker 2:On the second challenge I also see a lot of people talking about, which is also a vision of ManageEngine. We have a lot of business problems, but we are drowning in this sea of tools. Talk about any problem. We have been sold four, five tools. For process automation, I have five tools. So for service management, I have six tools. Observability, again four tools. So just managing all these tools has been a big problem for them, which is why Managing's vision of having a platform end-to-end is resonating really well with a lot of IT leaders. And the third obvious thing would be cybersecurity. It's a big concern, like we had the NASA astronaut yesterday talking about. Success is always a non-zero possibility. So is a case like a cybersecurity incident it can hit you anytime, from any direction, and that is a concern I see from IT leaders. Our business could be under attack anytime. So are we protected enough? Is our posture strong enough? Are we equipped enough to handle such a scenario? These are top of the mind questions for the technology leaders.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great insights. And of course you're all in on cloud and cloud adoption has accelerated. But course you're all in on cloud and cloud adoption has accelerated. But not every company goes all in on cloud and succumbs to the hyperscaler marketing campaigns. And you talked a lot about hybrid IT and multi-cloud and hybrid cloud including. Many of your customers have big premises activities. How do you think about this new world of multi-cloud?
Speaker 2:I mean we have always believed in giving the flexibility and option to our customers right? So, because you believe in something I mean our founding principles I talked about there, we have strong conviction. But when it comes to technology, we believe in giving options to our customers. And specifically talking about ManageEngine, we started with the on-premises model. We were one of the first to go fully cloud, fully SaaS, as early as in 2008 and 2009 with IT management. But to this day we offer both and we'll continue to offer both, because customers some of the applications, even from within ManageEngine, they choose to go cloud and for some of them, depending on the sensitivity of the data, depending on their infrastructural needs, they want to have on-premises.
Speaker 2:Many manufacturing companies have both IT and OT. It could be run from anywhere, but your operational technology runs in a very restricted environment there. They expect our products to run only on-premises, so hybrid is the way to go. Even so, that is another talking point. A lot of customers ask would you ever stop doing on-premises? Because some of our competition have done that completely stopped on-premises, because some of our competition have done that completely stopped on-premises, giving customers no option. We talk about cloud all the time. For us, cloud grows much, much faster than on-premises, but on-premises is still a viable business for ManageEngine and we'll continue that path going forward too, so important.
Speaker 1:And as we wrap up the user conference, what's top of mind as you think about the next two or three years? You have so much on your agenda. You really invest heavily in R&D. What are you excited about?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. We have top three priorities and the user conference. This has been by far the biggest in the US. So you were here. You could see that. Yeah for sure, right. So a lot of engagement. This year 2025, we are running 17 user conferences across the world Wow.
Speaker 2:So we have to understand the global customer needs. So this is how I will summarize the first need across talking to all these customers, this juggling with multiple tools, even within Manage Engine. So we have talk knowledge, we have 60 plus products and it becomes very overwhelming to just manage or, in customer's terms, babysit, all these products. They want a lot more automation functionality. They want Manage Engine to look, feel, act like one platform. That is a top priority for us. We have made a lot of progress. I'll give you an example. We manage the hybrid infrastructure. So you need to be putting small footprint agents in a lot of endpoints, both on-premises, on the mobile devices, on your virtual machine, sitting on the cloud. So we used to have multiple different agents depending on each functionality. Customers wanted it to be unified. Why would you need so many? I start with one of your products. Say the endpoint management. It already is pushing agents to the endpoint. Just increase the capability to also do log management, to also do lot management, to also do cybersecurity. So that is a big focus for ManageEngine. We are making a lot of progress.
Speaker 2:The second priority is obviously, like I spoke in the beginning, how do we give a massive AI boost across this ManageEngine platform? First, unify products, make it a platform. We have a lot of common services like analytics workflows cutting across all these products. Now how do we bring AI that delivers impact, tangible, measurable impact to our customers? That is number two priority.
Speaker 2:And the third is very interesting right. So we talk about cloud and cloud is going hyperlocal in terms of every country coming up with strict regulations mandating sovereignty of data, all of that. So any customer of ManageEngine choosing to go cloud, they have very strict compliance expectations. Where we run our data centers, is data center local. Can I use ManageEngine to comply to various local regulations? It's becoming a big business differentiator for customers and that is our third focus area how do we become compliant to various local regulations and, in addition, how could we use Managed Engine Platform to help our customers in their compliance journey? So these three, I would say is top three priorities for Managed Engine. We have a lot more, but these three will be the focus for the next one. Three five-year roadmap.
Speaker 1:Well, plenty of work to do so much ahead. Congratulations on a great event. Thanks for having me.