For ManageEngine, it's all about giving options to SMBs

“We remain committed and continue to support SMB businesses on their enterprise requirements,” says Arun Kumar, Regional Director, Asia Pacific at ManageEngine.

For ManageEngine, while a majority of its revenue comes from large enterprises, SMBs are still an important segment which they are continuing to support. As SMBs continue to grow in Southeast Asia, ManageEngine feels that the segment still has a lot of needs when it comes to their digitalization journey.

In a conversation with CRN Asia, Arun Kumar, Regional Director, Asia Pacific at ManageEngine shares how ManageEngine is supporting SMBs in their growth in the region. Kumar also talks about ManageEngine’s expansion plans as well as how they are looking forward to establishing a center of excellence in Kuala Lumpur in the near future.

How is ManageEngine supporting the SMBs growing in the region?

For ManageEngine, the idea is not just only to support enterprise requirements, because when we started our journey, we started with SMBs. We remain committed and continue to support SMB businesses on their enterprise requirements.

The way we are addressing these requirements is while the product is transforming into a platform, we let our customers pick and choose what they want. For example, if they want a comprehensive endpoint management and security platform to completely take care of their endpoints on the infrastructure, that's very much possible.

But on the other hand, let's say an SMB business has a very specific requirement like a patch management solution for example. Then, they can just buy patch management solution.

As a company, we strongly believe in keeping a very transparent business model. To ensure that, we have completely listed our pricing options on the website and these pricing options come with tiers.

Customers can buy as much as they want. They don't need to consume the entire platform, or they don't need to buy the complete product offering. They can pick and choose functionality.

They can pick and choose the license model also. And this model really works well for small and medium businesses because all they want is a specific problem to be addressed with a specific product. So that is how we ensure the SMB businesses are taken care of.

On top of that, we still continue to do a lot of events, workshops, training programs, user conferences for SMBs to ensure they also see the value and the commitment from the vendor.

Are SMBs representing a huge focus in the region right now or is it evenly spread out between enterprises and mid markets?

If you look at it from a customer count perspective, obviously the SMB customer count is actually quite higher. They contribute around 50-60% of the customer count when it comes to the number of deals being closed today.

But if you look at it from a revenue standpoint, 80% of our revenue obviously comes from mid and large enterprises because naturally the deal size is higher.

With that said, what are your plans for the rest of this year in the region?

The idea is we want to go very hyper local in each of the markets we function in today. We have opened offices in a lot of countries in Southeast Asia. The idea is to expand our team because the commitment is very clear from our end.

We want to build a complete localized team in each of the markets we operate today, of course based on priority. The goal is to have end-to-end localization of our products, build a very strong tech team, marketing team, account management team which can work very closely with our channel partners, enable channel partners really well so that they can take care of their customers.

And we in turn do a lot of initiatives when it comes to training programs, certification. So that is a work in progress, and we will continue to invest more in that direction. It's one major focus which we are working on today.

And secondly, I would say, we are also looking to come up with a training hub in Malaysia probably in the next I mean 8 to 12 months or 16 months depending upon other aspects to work well. The idea is to create a knowledge center or a center of excellence and a training hub for all our partners in Southeast Asia. They can use that facility, come get trained, understand all the best practices what we follow globally. This includes understanding the different use cases across different industries from different geographies which can then be replicated into the region so that partners will be able to create more value for our customers.

From a market expansion standpoint, Southeast Asia is one of the top growing markets for us. We grow the region around 25 to 30 percent every year consistently and we hope to continue to maintain that momentum for the next few years. Parallelly, we are having a very strong localized team which can facilitate, enable and support our partner ecosystem is the two-to-three-year goal which we are looking at.

Does ManageEngine currently have any center of excellence or training centers in the region right now?

The one in Malaysia would be the first one and will be a new model which we are going to follow. Today, we do a lot of training programs, but the training programs happen in different regions and it's in a different model.

The training hub what I'm referring to is kind of like comes with the complete setup which also has the infrastructure which will help customer to kind of like do trials, play with different functionalities, tools, different data sets, create scenarios and all of that.

So that is something which we are looking to do first time in Malaysia.

Lastly, in conversations with customers, where do you see GenAI and agentic AI coming in? Are customers really focused and are they prepared to deploy AI?

If you look at the expectations or the roadmap, the plan for most of the customers is to actually adopt AI. There are no two ways about it, but at what level is always the question because particularly if you look at it from an enterprise requirement standpoint, the ask is what kind of use cases can AI solve for them and at what level of accuracy?

These are two important aspects which need clear, definitive answers and a commitment. Today, AI is already there in the form of automation and a through a certain level of predictions throughs things like anomaly detection or reducing false positives or kind of like doing some bit of capacity planning. Chatbots are also very well adopted today.

These are some use cases in which customers have already adopted AI capabilities as part of their business requirements, but can you let AI take decisions? Can you also make it run on its own and make changes wherever required from an IT management perspective or from a cybersecurity perspective or for an end-to-end automation perspective?

These are questions which customers have as part of their roadmap, but with always that question, what is the level of accuracy you can bring today? So that is where it stands today. So, part of AI adoption is very well there.

Will it take it to the next level? That depends upon what use cases we can solve for them, but I can definitely see in 2025 that the confidence level or the adoption rate has definitely increased.