ManageEngine’s partner ecosystem core to its growth in Southeast Asia

“When it comes to Southeast Asia, 100% of our business is driven through the channel partner ecosystem. We don't do any direct business,” says Arun Kumar, Regional Director, Asia Pacific at ManageEngine.

ManageEngine continues to experience exponential growth in Southeast Asia. As the IT management division of Zoho Corporation, ManageEngine offers both cloud and on-premises solutions.

In Southeast Asia, the major focus industries include banking and finance, healthcare, government, education and the IT sector, with a majority of revenue coming from mid and large enterprises.

According to Arun Kumar, Regional Director, Asia Pacific at ManageEngine, about 70% to 80% of the revenue comes from large enterprises with small and medium businesses contributing to the balance, despite having a much larger customer count.

From a product adoption standpoint, Kumar stated that monitoring solutions, service management, endpoint management, and security are the top adopted products from ManageEngine in the Southeast Asia region.

Enabling this is ManageEngine’s channel ecosystem. In an interview with CRN Asia, Kumar shares more about their plans for partners and the importance of the channel ecosystem in supporting their growth and presence in the region.

How does ManageEngine’s channel ecosystem help spread the technology and connect to the right customers?

When it comes to Southeast Asia, 100% of our business is driven through the channel partner ecosystem. We don't do any direct business.

We entered Southeast Asia around 2007 and 2008, and the mission was to work and develop the market through the channel ecosystem. So today, if you look at the tier one (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam) and tier two (Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan and Laos) countries in the region, every market has a very strong channel presence for us. Some of these channel partners have been working with us for almost 15 to 20 years.

They represent the face of ManageEngine in that region in a very collaborated working model because they carry the complete 360-degree approach when it comes to that particular region. In Southeast Asia, each country operates very differently. There is language barriers and translation which is required in some markets while other markets are fine with English.

It's a very dynamic and different approach each market carries today. The partner ecosystem for us refers to are partners who carry the complete marketing expertise when it comes to localization, complete tech capability, right from positioning our products at a pre-sales level, consulting level, to deploying the products, and also in terms of support.

Once somebody buys the product, they represent us. They carry an end-to-end approach when it comes to penetrating the market, and that's the approach we have taken.

How are you ensuring your partners have the capabilities that you just mentioned?

Okay, so we have taken a couple of approaches. This includes providing periodic training, certification programs, and creating more awareness. It has really worked out well.

As we are more of an enterprise-grade vendor today, taking that platform approach requires a lot of consulting, as well as a lot of account management, health check programs, as well as build the domain expertise, which is required for enterprise customers to support and serve our partners and customers better. We have also now expanded into all tier one markets.

Today, ManageEngine is not just a company based out of India. We have 34 regional offices having local tech capability, marketing support, and all of that. So, in every tier one market for ManageEngine, we have technical people, we have marketing people, and we have account management who are part of the region. While we have our own team, the idea is to completely work and enable channel partners.

So, the approach would be when it is an enterprise customer, we kind of like to do joint engagements. We try to completely understand their requirements. Then, let the partner do the front-ending in terms of implementing the product and all of that. But at a later stage, this account also needs regular account management, periodic analysis, and how we can actually show business outcomes based on their business demands.

While our partners are continuously enabled trained, we also have built local talent in all these markets to complement, enable, and support our partner ecosystem, particularly for the large enterprise requirements.

Are you also looking to recruit more partners in the region as well?

It depends. In some markets, we have partners who have really scaled up well with us. There are partners who have taken a complete 360-degree approach, such as building the complete marketing function, the support function, the tech function, all of that.

So, we have elevated them to value-added distributors. And we are trying to build a very strong channel ecosystem under them, because you have to work through a lot of system integrators, value-added resellers, plus you should also work with MSPs and transactional partners.

This ecosystem is very important if you want to grow the market, because as one partner or one vendor, it is practically not possible to scale to the entire market requirements, right? So that is where the channel ecosystem comes into picture.

The model that we have followed is based on different countries' geography and based on how well our partners have scaled. Some of the markets we have made one partner as the value-added distributor and built a very strong channel ecosystem under them. And in some other markets, depending upon the size, geography, and the value proposition the particular partner has, we have built a very complementing partner model, where we let two, three partners or five partners operate in that region.

The idea is to have a more channel ecosystem model of inclusivity, where you have MSPs, system integrators, and transactional partners into the plot. Based on their strength and capability, we kind of like to try to do this adjustment.

What are partners hoping to see more from you guys?

When a customer goes with a vendor, it's not just six months or a one-year journey they look at. They kind of invest and believe in a vendor for at least five years. Because changing technology or changing a tool is not only cost, but also a big effort, right?

So, the first natural question that comes is, is the company investing in the right technology? What do their product roadmaps look like? And particularly in today's scenario, everybody talks about AI capabilities, right? And AI itself is very different in 2024 and very different in 2025. That’s how dynamic change is happening today because of the language models, the agentic AI, and all of that coming in.

One question which always comes in from partners is, what kind of AI capabilities do you have? What does your product roadmap look like? And the third important thing they always ask is, how are you complying? What kind of security processes and procedures do you follow today?

Because in a digitized enterprise, one attack is more than enough to bring your reputation down. And if you're regular attacks, you're technically out of business today.

And if you look at what's important for a customer, they are looking for a vendor who's investing in the right technologies and also ensuring the security posture is great for that vendor. So, these are fundamental questions we come across today and particularly when partners are our own teams who engage with the customer.

Speaking of AI, are customers going to invest more in it this year?

I would say they are already investing at different levels in terms of maturity. If you look at ManageEngine as a company, we have been investing in AI in 2010. We built our own machine learning capabilities using the model called ZIA (Zoho Intelligent Assistant).

The idea was that we wanted to put AI as part of the capability on all products we build. It cannot be a separate product in itself, or it cannot be a separate functionality.

Customers should adopt AI without knowing they're using AI. Things like automation or anomaly detection or prediction or capacity planning are certain capabilities. And most of these were built long back as part of each product's capabilities over the last 10, 15 years.

But now, we are talking about language models and about agentic AI. The approach we are taking today is to let customers integrate with any language model they use today with a concept we call the platform approach, where they can bring their own key and integrate with our products.

For example, if it is ChatGPT or Gemini or Llama, if they have the enterprise key, they can bring the enterprise key, apply through the platform approach, and it works very well and integrates.

Customers can leverage the language models and use AI functionalities as part of our product, depending upon what product they use today. And the next step, we are trying to build agentic AI capabilities, where the ZIA functionality or AskZia, which is kind of like a co-pilot approach, will be part of the product. Customers can use it as a virtual assistant in terms of having a few commands or questions thrown at it and it gives them the answers.

Also, if you look at products like a security suite of products, your language model might not be accurate, because most of the language models come with generic requirements. But say, for example, identifying malware or threat detection or anomaly prediction, you need to have a highly trained model. For those specific requirements, we kind of like building a narrow model approach.

The idea is a mix of public LLMs with our own language model, and this will help customers leverage the real outcomes, be it an AI capability as a feature or take a co-pilot approach or an agentic approach is what the larger, broader plan we are building as part of the managing capabilities.