01732 759725 36 INSIGHT In last month’s issue, we explained how ManageEngine is expanding its partner network to drive growth in the UK and how its solutions work more like an ecosystem than individual products, with easy integration and data sharing between different elements. This month, we look at other benefits of ManageEngine products for resellers, MSPs and end users So, a key management solution becomes part of our PAM (privileged access management) solution, which becomes part of our IAM (identity and access management) solution. We travel where the market takes us.” He adds that products are also developed to meet ManageEngine’s own requirements, like its new identity and access management solution, Identity 360. “When I started working with ManageEngine 15 years ago, we had around 250 people. Now we have 2,000 employees, we have a global presence and we have offices in 15 countries. We needed a PAM solution for our own internal consumption. We started building the solution, it worked really well and so we expanded it and opened it up for the market.” Chellapa says that this approach to product development promotes simplicity, ease of use and affordability, which chimes well with customers in the current business climate. “Identity and access management is an area where we see good growth because the budgets of small and medium-sized businesses are under pressure and some of the leading vendors in this area are expensive. SMEs are looking for an affordable and user-friendly solution that is easy to deploy and migrate to and that's where ManageEngine’s strengths lie.” A different licensing model He adds that with some products, like ManageEngine’s PAM solution, affordability is a product of the licensing model rather than any conscious decision to develop a cost-effective product. “Our licensing model is quite different to how other vendors license their products. Any enterprise will have a certain number of devices and a certain number of users, and those two numbers constantly change. If you fire up 50 new virtual machines you will have 50 more devices and if 25 interns join you will have 25 more users. With our PAM product, we don't charge enterprises according to how many devices they have or how many users they have. Instead, we look at how many administrative people they have and charge on that basis. You could have thousands of servers, and we would still licence the PAM product on the number of people who are going to administer it, irrespective of your infrastructure.” UK country head Shankar Haridas says that while the licensing model might be different for some of its other products, ManageEngine will always offer volume discounts. This, he suggests, is helping to attract new customers and large enterprises that might have invested heavily in expensive solutions and are now looking for affordable solutions that they can deploy and migrate to quickly. “During the pandemic, when they underwent a digital transformation, these organisations needed a huge level of spending to achieve that. Now, they are looking for a cost-cutting solution, so we're getting a lot of requests from the NHS these days. And the thing with ManageEngine is it’s not just one product; it solves the entire IT infrastructure.” Easy integration and migration Chellapa says the message ManageEngine is trying to get across is that it’s always wise to choose a vendor with an extensive portfolio. “If I buy an ITSM solution from one vendor and a monitoring solution from another, they will be two different solutions, built with probably two different technologies by two different teams. You can probably create a very loose connection between them, but they will never gel together and be as capable as a solution built by the same vendor. “At the same time, we don't lose sight of the fact that an enterprise might be using ServiceNow or BMC Remedy ITSM, so if they come to our PAM product they ManageEngine, the fast-growing IT security and management division of Zoho, has enjoyed rapid growth by providing end user businesses and managed service providers with an expanding portfolio of service management, operations management, endpoint management and identity and access management solutions, in the cloud and on-premises. Ganesh Chellapa, Head of Support Services, points out ManageEngine does not set out to build products from scratch. Instead, it has a framework, on top of which it builds services and then applications. Because its 50-odd solutions share the same services and framework, they work like an ecosystem, with tight integration, the same UI and easy datasharing between applications. Another benefit of this approach is that it supports organic product development, which, according to Chellapa, is how many of ManageEngine’s products come into being. “We build our solutions in a very decentralised fashion. We look at the market, we talk to customers and if they are looking for a solution that is not already available, we'll put 10 developers on a project to see if it is feasible. It grows from there and once it is developed, we bring it into the silo where it should be. Going where the market takes it Ganesh Chellapa
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