Sujoy Banerjee, Associate Director at ManageEngine, explains that the company prioritises hybrid IT solutions and cybersecurity enhancements for Middle Eastern organisations, focusing on cloud adoption, localized support, and partner training to drive regional digital transformation and address evolving cyber threats.
What are the key business priorities for ManageEngine in the Middle East over the next 12-18 months?
As organisations in the Middle East move towards cloud adoption, ManageEngine will be actively focusing on providing comprehensive tools for strengthening hybrid IT environments, including both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. The evolving cybersecurity landscape in the Middle East also witnesses new threats in the region, with cyberattacks and data breaches reaching around $ 8 million in the Middle East in 2023, according to the latest IBM Cost of Data Breach report. We have been actively working towards strengthening our suite of security products to address such evolving threats. Our priority is to provide robust IT solutions that addresses the new threats as well as enable organisations to modernize their IT infrastructure, automate processes and improve overall operational efficiency.
In addition to this, we are also working on expanding our market reach through more collaborative efforts with our regional partners. We aim to provide more localized support and offer customized solutions for our customers’ business needs.
What specific initiatives are you undertaking to expand your partner ecosystem in the Middle East?
We collaborate with our regional partners to expand our market reach and also to get in touch with our esteemed customers to cater to their specific customer needs. The onus would be on enabling our partners by providing them with training programs and seminars in the region to equip them with the right knowledge and resources to help our customers further. The success of our customers through the implementation of our suite of solutions has always been our main priority. Upskilling our partners is an active initiative that we focus on in order to tailor our efforts towards the success of our customers. This would also help us in our customer success programs by providing localized support for our regional customers as and when they require it.
How is ManageEngine adapting its solutions to meet the unique needs of businesses in the Middle East, particularly in sectors like government, finance, and healthcare?
Every business will have their own unique needs. However, the first important step would be to comply with the regional regulations, and we actively help our customers to adhere to all regulations with our suite of solutions. Across different sectors, the importance is on setting up an IT infrastructure that can scale up based on business needs. By also providing industry specific features that caters to their needs, we enable organisations in their journey towards digital transformation. We also partner with local organisations in the region to understand the regional painpoints and how we can further localize our efforts for our customers.
How does ManageEngine ensure compliance with local regulations and data sovereignty laws in the Middle East?
At ManageEngine, we maintain dedicated compliance teams that will ensure compliance with the local regulations of the region. These teams would proactively review the data access policies across regions in order to ensure compliance and to navigate through the diverse regulatory mandates in different regions. Since we operate through partners, it becomes easier to collaborate with the local institutions and also to consult experts to ensure that we comply with the latest regulations in the region. We also prioritize on regularly updating and patching our products in order to address any new security vulnerabilities and regulatory requirements as compliance requisites change over time. By following a dedicated configuration and policy management, we ensure that our suite of solutions align with the regional regulations, especially when setting up security policies, providing user access controls that meet the regional regulations.
What role does customer feedback from the Middle East play in your product development and strategy?
In order to cater to the business needs of our customers successfully, it is important that we receive feedback on our suite of solutions and how, going forward, we can improve on providing our expertise. Connecting with our customers enables us to spot new trends and changes in the market with respect to cybersecurity threats or any specific cyber attacks that have been preying on certain vulnerabilities. Through industry events as well as company led User Conferences, we prioritize on providing a voice for our customers to understand what they look for in their business journey forward. Customer feedback also enables us to focus on certain aspects of our suite of IT solutions, which would go a long way towards setting up our product roadmap in order to cater to our customers’ ever-evolving demands and needs.
What training and certification programs do you offer to your channel partners in the Middle East to ensure they are equipped to deliver value to customers?
We offer a range of training modules, seminars, as well as certification programs to our partners to ensure that they are well-equipped with the right know-how to deliver value to our customers across regions. We follow the same suit in the Middle East. Certification programs such as ManageEngine Certified Professional (MCP) and ManageEngine Certified Sales Professional (MCSP) validates that the partner involved is an expert in sales strategies as well as proven in managing and deploying our suite of products seamlessly to our customers. Such programs will ensure that our partners not only are well-equipped with the right knowledge but also understand the different painpoints of our customers and how they can customize to the customers’ unique needs.
How does ManageEngine differentiate its product offerings in the Middle Eastern market compared to other regions?
ManageEngine offers a plethora of IT solutions that is catered to the needs of the customers in different regions. The main differentiator across regions would be in understanding and simplifying the regulations and being compliant with the local laws in the region. It is the same for the Middle East wherein we focus on adapting to the ever-changing regulatory laws in the Middle East. We streamline the efforts for our customers towards being compliant to the local laws and also prioritize localization wherein the products are better adjusting towards the Middle East users via user interface, language and by enhancing integration capabilities. We ensure that the complex process of compliance is simplified and made easy for our customers on top of providing enterprise-ready integrated solutions that can are easily configured/ customized and ready to use across industry verticals.
Can you elaborate on your channel strategy in the Middle East? How are you supporting your partners to drive growth in this region?
Our channel strategy revolved around working in sync with our partners in the region ensuring that they understand the business culture, objectives, and how we could work together towards finding success. The Middle East is a multi-partner driven region for us and hence, it is important for us to identify the right partners to work with. While the end goal would be to work towards business success, we also view our partners as an integral part of our business strategy going forward. By providing them with the right know-how as well as educate them as to how we work as a company, by understanding where our values stand and how we drive the business, we slowly make them an extension of the company across regions.
Are there any new products or updates in your portfolio that are particularly relevant to the Middle Eastern market?
ManageEngine is always at the forefront of understanding the needs of our customers and to adapt to the ever-changing demands and needs of the region. With respect to the Middle East market, we have unveiled “Exploit Triad Analytics,” a ML-powered addition to our SIEM solution Log360. It focuses on tracing the path of adversaries or bad actors that could potentially cause data breaches. This update would provide contextual visibility to users over understanding the exploit triad of users, entities and processes.
With the increasing adoption of cloud services, we have also expanded on our capabilities for CloudSpend – our cloud cost management tool which enables end users to focus on cost optimization enabling enterprises with a multi-cloud setup to streamline their expenses. We have also extended our Cloudspend support across the three largest public cloud computing platforms namely, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure and AWS.
How are you addressing the challenges faced by Middle Eastern organizations in terms of cybersecurity and IT management?
At ManageEngine, we are constantly working towards enhancing our cybersecurity posture to equip our customers to face the ever-evolving cyberthreats that exists in the cyberspace. With the advent of emerging technologies such as AI and ML, it has become a double-edged sword with cyber criminals enhancing their attacks by making use of the seemingly limitless capabilities and potential of AI.
Regarding the Middle East market, we are focusing on ensuring all-round cybersecurity for our customers. With the Middle East region experiencing a sharp spike in cyberattacks, the onus is on enhancing cybersecurity capabilities by incorporating the latest advanced technology. With AI-driven attacks being the main contributor towards finding loopholes and endpoint vulnerabilities, the idea is to counter and mitigate such attacks wherein the threat itself can be voided even before it happens. ManageEngine also focuses on both on-prem and cloud capabilities for our suite of IT solutions; with the rise in adoption towards cloud in the Middle East region, we have been aiding our customers towards unlocking their cloud capabilities.
