ITechnology Interview with Mathivanan Venkatachalam, Vice President, Product Management at ManageEngine

“enterprises have complex IT environments that are distributed across corporate data centers, private and public clouds, and the network edge, making it important to build a global data fabric with advanced analytics.”

Please tell us about your current role and the technology sector you handle at ManageEngine. 

In my current role as vice president of product management, I set the strategic vision for our products and drive high-level initiatives that are required to deliver a complete product experience and sustain business growth for both the IT operations management (ITOM) and unified endpoint management and security portfolios at ManageEngine.  

Tell us a bit about the role of Advanced IT analytics in the IT Ops business processes? How does ManageEngine layer its IT Operations Management around Application security, Automation and Analytics? 

Today’s enterprises have complex IT environments that are distributed across corporate data centers, private and public clouds, and the network edge, making it important to build a global data fabric with advanced analytics to establish a single source of truth for all things related to enterprise IT operations. 

Combining this data fabric with advanced analytics and AI and ML models will improve decision-making, enhance capacity planning, and ensure continuous uptime and availability with minimal latency for service delivery around the world, thereby ensuring exceptional end-user experiences for employees and customers. 

In our ITOM solutions, we focus on providing a single view to serve as the one source of truth for enterprise IT operations. From an application security standpoint, we provide attack detection; threat intelligence; UEBA with security orchestration, automation, and response; and code-level application performance visibility and transaction monitoring via APM Insight. Enterprises can also monitor the underlying infrastructure on which these applications are deployed, such as bare-metal servers, virtual machines, hyperconverged infrastructure, containers, and microservices.  

For automation, we offer a custom workflow builder to orchestrate actions such as provisioning infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code tools, deploying application images to provisioned infrastructure, troubleshooting performance issues with scripts, and executing routine maintenance tasks.  

For analytics, we offer augmented and predictive analytics capabilities with AI, ML, and natural language processing so enterprises have everything they need in a customisable dashboard to manage IT operations with data-driven insights and decisions. 

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How is the Application security market shaping up in the modern Cloud automation era? 

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, organisations are drastically migrating their entire workload to the cloud. This has inevitably resulted in an increase in security vulnerabilities that hackers can leverage to ransom enormous amounts of money.  

To tackle such attacks at an application level, it’s imperative for organisations to have an efficient mechanism in place to:  

• Identify, remediate, and prevent security vulnerabilities throughout the application development life cycle. 

• Prioritise critical vulnerabilities and resolve them with automated risk assessment. 

• Obtain contextual and actionable insights into any present vulnerabilities. 

• Leverage runtime application self-protection to get immediate alerts and avoid further exploitation by attackers. 

Which technologies are influencing the outcome of MSP roadmaps? 

MSPs tend to be proactive because their business model revolves around ensuring seamless operations for their clients. In this regard, MSP roadmaps will prioritise:  

 On-demand scalability with cloud-native technologies to ensure application performance and service delivery aren’t degraded. 

• Network automation to reduce the effort spent on routine tasks, minimise manual errors and discrepancies, and increase the focus on high-value initiatives. 

• Integrated remote monitoring and management solutions that provide full-stack observability across the network, servers, storage, applications, and endpoints with help desk and automation functionalities. The ability of these solutions to integrate with third-party software is also key as some MSPs are also looking to integrate best-of-breed solutions to achieve in-depth visibility and breadth of functionality.  

• Cybersecurity with Zero Trust access; network and endpoint detection and response; firewall rules; configuration, change, compliance, and vulnerability management; and application security. 

• Advanced IT analytics with AI to manage complex customer environments, and anomaly detection, outage prediction, forecasting for capacity planning, and performance monitoring with dynamic baselining to ensure seamless operations. 

How do you see the future of IT Management for MSPs evolving with maturity of AI and cybersecurity for IT Ops? 

The key to resilient and efficient IT management for MSPs is to achieve an autonomous state where automation and AI simplify or even completely execute actions such as provisioning, deployment, maintenance, or updating systems or applications with minimal human intervention while consistently ensuring optimum performance levels.  

The current rate of technology development and maturity attests to the fact that it’s not a far-fetched idea to see such levels of autonomy in IT operations among enterprises and MSPs alike. In addition, mature AI models will be able to identify and isolate anomalous behavior quickly and initiate remediation with minimum impact to business services for enhanced cybersecurity.

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Your three predictions for IT remote work management and how it impacts SMEs 

Remote work management for IT revolves around providing highly available and responsive applications and services to employees and partners in transitory workplaces.  

So, in terms of technology, we’re looking at an increase in the adoption of cloud-native solutions, and enterprises moving to the edge across different verticals depending on specific use cases.  

When it comes to managing these disparate systems, we’re looking at full-stack observability implementations, and bids to achieve autonomous operations with extensive automation. This will result in an influx of AI models to aid IT operations or AIOps, especially factoring in the large volume of data generated at endpoints via work devices, IoT sensors, etc.  

The resulting impact for small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will be positive. Solution vendors and MSPs will play a huge role in providing SMEs with cutting-edge technologies and management tools, resulting in greater ROIs and business expansions with new revenue streams, optimised process flows, reduced expenditure, and accelerated outcomes. 

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Thank you, Mathivanan! That was fun and we hope to see you back on itechnologyseries.com soon.