Why Malaysia is a key market for Zoho and Manage Engine

Both Zoho and ManageEngine are major divisions of the Zoho Corporation, with one focusing on business software than the other one focusing on enterprise IT management.

Zoho and ManageEngine recently opened their first office in Malaysia after several years of successful operation. The new office not only cements both Zoho and ManageEngine’s success and growth in the country but also reinforces its commitment to enabling both its partners and customers on their latest innovations.

CRN Asia caught up with Gibu Matthew, Vice President and General Manager for APAC at Zoho Corporation and Rajesh Ganesan, CEO of ManageEngine at the launch to understand more about their operations in the country and their growth plans as well.

Can you tell us about the opportunities for both Zoho and ManageEngine in Malaysia?

Gibu: The Malaysian market is an important market because of its demographics and unique basic strengths for the country to play a special role in the region. There is a lot of investments happening by the government in the startup ecosystem. We are seeing a lot of interesting new manufacturing capabilities and testing especially for chips and other aspects happening in Malaysia. These are all actually adding up to the overall ecosystem strength and Malaysia's ability to actually support it.

It is also one of the most productive economies in the region. From a maturity perspective, there is still some level of maturity from an IT maturity perspective that is needed with all this transformation, data security, privacy, all those aspects, lot of data is now flowing through all sorts of IT ecosystems.

Now, this is where Zoho as a company can help in terms of digital transformation. ManageEngine as the IT management division of Zoho Corporation is again another very important aspect that plays as the foundation on which all this data flows because data governance and security are all core aspects for any organization to go. So those are aspects that we as an organization are able to support in the overall Malaysian economy.

Rajesh: To share some perspective, ManageEngine has about ,000 paying customers across the globe. In the ASEAN region, there are about 7500 and in Malaysia there are 750 customers. The important thing is out of the 750 customers we have in Malaysia, a significant portion are either enterprises, big enterprises or government agencies. This is one of the very few countries where we have a very high concentration of ManageEngine used for high maturity operations.

So, it exemplifies the digital maturity Malaysia has and gives a good foundation. While Malaysia is about 1 or 2 percentage of customer base for ManageEngine, our goal has been how do we expand, how do we give our customers, our partners and our ecosystem the confidence.

You need to have a local presence and even though we are a company rooted in India, most of our hires in Malaysia would be locals, knowing the culture, speaking the language and that is the reason why we are opening the office here. So, we are a global company that started in India but with a vision to not be an Indian company but be a global technology powerhouse originating from India with the operating model that will be going ultra local.

So, when we are in Malaysia, we have to be a Malaysian company. So that requires our physical presence here and that is why we are starting the office. We typically do not start with this big bang approach. We start small, have a long-term view of things, and grow organically, which is why this milestone is very important for us.

How will this office also support your partners in their enablement and capabilities to support customers as well?

Rajesh: Zoho and ManageEngine are two divisions of Zoho Corp as a company. So, ManageEngine, because of the domain we operate in, requires a lot of assistance for our customers with heavy lifting. For example, how do they take our products, install it, commission it, and put it to production.

And ManageEngine is 100% channel driven in this region. So, how does it matter? We need to enable our partners. So, they are our true front-facing teams. They represent ManageEngine not just in terms of products and technology but in terms of culture, which is very important.

10Infinity is our distributor in Malaysia and they work with hundreds of reseller partners. It is not just enabling them and their team; it is also the hundreds of reseller partners under them, and they can use this facility. We'll have a local team here which includes a technical team, account management team, customer success team, and marketing teams. Hence, the office will act as a partner and ecosystem enabling center for ManageEngine.

Gibu: Our objective as an office over here is to enable the ecosystem. So, we work with government organizations, trade associations, and such. We support them in whatever way we can in terms of training and educating the market itself, that is an important aspect for us and then of course, eventually we also support our partners who are there in Malaysia and we support our customers.

We have quite a lot of big customers, key customers in Malaysia. Supporting our local customers and our key accounts in the Zoho side of the business is imperative for us. And we are two business units, one focusing on business software than the other one focusing on enterprise IT management. Both are equally popular in the local market, and we have a slightly different approach to how we go to market.

Zoho does a lot of direct business also. So, that way it is slightly different and being software as a service is a slightly different model. But overall, if you look at how we have been able to work with the local market, supporting organizations and the team here, they actually play an important role in localizing our products.

For example, as e-invoicing is going to get mandatory in Malaysia, our products are getting localized for Malaysia for that specific use case. So, the team here plays an important part in making sure that our products are localized for the local needs. So, our goal is to be hyper-local. We want to be hyper local and be more of a Malaysian company that does what is needed to grow the ecosystem here.

With that said, what goals have you all set for the year that you are hoping to achieve?

Gibu: Our main goal is to be hyper local. When I say hyper local, we already have local employees here. We have even launched our own Malaysian products in Malaysian ringgit. So, our goals are actually to be as much more local, not just speaking that we are local, but to be taking the steps to actually be fully local.

We are definitely taking all our products to the local market based on what is needed. It is not just about revenue goals. I do not want to talk about revenue goals here, because revenue will eventually come. Our policy in general is to always look at the long-term perspective in mind.

So, whatever is needed to make sure that the organizations locally trust us. That trust is what we want to build in the local market first. That is actually the most important goal for this year and then everything else will follow is what we believe.

Rajesh: It’s the same for ManageEngine. When we talk about goals from the products and business side, we are going to focus more on how we enable businesses to adopt AI much more safely and securely, right. Because we all know what AI is capable of, but you can use it in the context of your personal lives much more freely. But apply AI in the context of business, you need a lot of guardrails, you need to be compliant with various regulations, privacy, everything comes to place.

How can we enable our customers to leverage AI to its fullest potential in a secure and safe way? That is a big product and technology goal for ManageEngine. So, obviously, a lot more automation, intelligent automation would come on the business side, and we are already delivering on our goals.

We have the office now; the next step is to grow the team here locally. Malaysia’s revenue for ManageEngine grew 25% in 2025, which is much more than the global growth rate. So, we intend to continue.

This local office will help us grow significantly at a much higher rate for ManageEngine. So, these are broader goals for us. If we have a local presence, if we build a good local team, enable our partners, these goals will take care of themselves.

Speaking of AI, a lot of vendors are building AI innovation centers in Southeast Asia. Are there plans for you guys to do something like that in Malaysia as well?

Rajesh: Directly it will come at some point, but our ManageEngine partner has built an experience and innovation center. So, this is built using Zoho and ManageEngine tools.

Any new problems that our customers have, that is a good lab to understand the problem, build a solution, demonstrate proof of concept. So, that is something we sort of co-invested, and they took the lead. So, they made some investments including setting up the space and we chipped in with what is needed technically, like enabling the products, giving them the necessary training, and when they need any help, we are always available.

In terms of us doing it directly, I would say it is on the cards, and we have to do one country at a time.