AI Agents for IT Operations: The New CIO Playbook

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong TV. I'm really happy to introduce our next guest.

He is the CEO of ManageEngine, which is a part of a division of Zoho Corp, and his name is Rajesh Ganesan. If I mispronounced that, I apologize. Ganesan.

Rajesh, correct me. How is it said? You did well, Alan.

I'm Rajesh Ganesan. Rajesh Ganesan. Very cool.

Rajesh, before we jump into Zoho and ManageEngine and AI, of course, because we always all talk about AI, let's give our audience a sense of who they're listening, who they're watching here. I mentioned you're the CEO, but how did you arrive here? Okay.

Good morning again, Alan. Thanks for having me in your show. I'm Rajesh Ganesan.

I'm CEO of ManageEngine. Had a long journey, interesting journey. Been a great ride so far.

It all started in 1997. Goes a long way back. I've stayed with this company since 1997.

When we got started at that time, we were called Advenet Network Management System. 0. The world was building the internet infrastructure, and that infrastructure needed software to manage itself.

So, if you imagine the times of optical network switches, so all these big telcos laying the foundation for internet infrastructure. We supplied a software platform that could do performance monitoring, configuration management, security for those networks, networks that were getting deployed across North America. It was a very niche business.

It was growing very well. So we started in '97. By 2000, we were extremely profitable.

But as luck would have it, you also remember the 2001 time frame, where we had the first dot-com bubble bursting. 0. So we needed to pivot at this point, pivot to a completely new business, and that is how ManageEngine was formed.

We had good experience managing complex network infrastructure, internet infrastructure. We then thought companies are anyway having their own technology infrastructure. This was the time IT teams started getting formed, information technology teams getting formed across the world in enterprises.

The role of CEO becoming more and more prominent. We thought we could build products that could help the CIOs manage their IT infrastructure, as it is called then, keeping the lights on of your infrastructure. We released our first product for basic network monitoring, trouble ticketing, asset management, patch management, password management.

If you had a Active Directory as the directory service, we supplied tools to manage all of that. This is how we got started in 2002, and I joined the company in '97 as a programmer. I wrote a lot of code in the C language, assembly language, embedded systems, and all of that.

Then moved to writing software in Java, building complex network management systems. And when ManageEngine started, it saw very early traction. I mean, world is continuing to invest in technology, and you always need also solutions that run and manage the infrastructure, and that's where ManageEngine plays in.

The first product from ManageEngine went out in 2002, and we are in the 24th year of business. And I started again as a programmer, then wore a lot of hats, multiple different hats. I wrote product documentation, did customer support, did pre-sales, tried my hand in marketing.

I came a long way, 30 years now with the company. We call that well-rounded, right? Yeah.

I think when you've been around that long, I've been around that long, too, you do get to wear a lot of hats. But it makes you better for it. Yes?

Exactly. So, and for the last couple of years, I've taken over the role of CEO for ManageEngine. From where we started, we started at zero.

Today, ManageEngine has about 90,000 customers across the globe. It includes all six continents. We have products in the domains of service management, infrastructure and operations, cybersecurity that includes identity access management, endpoint security, endpoint management, your SIEM, which is a important piece, privileged access management, analytics, you name it.

So today, ManageEngine is a single end-to-end platform for the CIOs and the CISO's organization. As they manage a complex hybrid technology infrastructure, things are all over the place. You have complex cloud infrastructure, on-premises infrastructure, people working from wherever they are, and you obviously don't have a good control of who are part of your workforce.

You have gig workers, you have contractors, you have partners, full-time employees. How do they get access to information in your infrastructure? How do you keep track of the devices that come into the infrastructure?

The devices that come in, obviously, do they have the right posture? Are they patched properly? Things like data leak prevention, things like endpoint detection and response.

You have various different challenges as technology evolves, and ManageEngine is in the business of helping the CIOs and the CISOs manage complexity in terms of providing a software platform that can monitor, manage, secure their infrastructure, and make them compliant to various regulations. So that is about ManageEngine and about my journey with ManageEngine for the last three decades, Alan. First of all, congratulations.

Thank you. I'm sure you are aware, but it's almost unheard of that someone should be at the same company going on 30 years now, 29 years, something like that, right? Right.

And you've grown up as Zoho has grown up and changed and- Yes ... and you've been able to ride that change and live that change and change along with that change. Right.

So that is fantastic. Just before we jump into what I want to talk about, which is what is going on now, I wanted to just get two things out of the way. com, the right website?

Yes, that is right. com is the website, of course, yes. And then secondly, look, as you mentioned, Zoho started off as one thing, but over the years has become a sort of conglomerate, if you will- Right ...

of a lot of different ManageEngine being one brand and one product line, but a lot of product lines. Just briefly, if you could tell people the breadth of what Zoho does. Yeah.

I spoke about the first pivot that we made in- Right ... 2000, 2001 to ManageEngine. See, the logic then was very simple.

I spoke about how we were building software that we were supplying for internet infrastructure companies. Imagine we had 50, 60 companies across the entire world that was building such equipment, and we were supplying to a market base of 50 customers. And when 30 or 40 of them disappeared because of what happens in the market, you are in deep trouble.

So that learning we took when we founded ManageEngine, we said we should go after a market where we have 50,000 customers and not 50 customers, right? And once ManageEngine became a good success, it saw good traction very early on. We carried that learning.

Why should we stop with serving only 50,000 customers across the globe? Why not we go after 50 million customer base? And that's how Zoho was born.

Like I told you, ManageEngine focuses on the IT organizations, the CIO's organization. With Zoho, the idea is go after every business function, right? Starting from the CEO to the chief people officer.

We have a HR management suite. We go after chief revenue officers. We have a full-blown customer experience and Salesforce automation suite.

We have products for the CFO. We have a very comprehensive finance management suite in Zoho. We have great comprehensive back office collaboration in terms of document collaboration, voice collaboration, text collaboration, all of that.

So this is the idea behind Zoho. Zoho and ManageEngine are the same company, right? So we are technically the same company.

Two different brands, two different divisions. Just that we wanted to keep the brands distinct. ManageEngine's identity is go serve the IT function, the CIO's organization inside enterprises.

All other business functions supported by IT will be served by Zoho. Otherwise, the technology stack is the same for building products from Zoho and ManageEngine. The software that we deliver from the cloud, we use the same infrastructure as well.

All the data sits in the same data center. The applications can talk to each other. People who sign up for their first Zoho service automatically also can consume ManageEngine products and vice versa.

So to clarify this, we are just two divisions, two brands from the same company, operating globally. We are still privately held, completely bootstrapped. Never raised any external capital.

That has been our model, and we have managed to come a long way in the last three decades as one company with 20,000 people now, close to. Having thousands of partners across the world, like I said, done business in 190 countries, in terms of receiving an official PO. Been a great ride and, yeah, we are a company that obsess about customers, listen to customers, and feedback, validation, questions, and the directions set by the customers is what has brought us here for both Zoho and ManageEngine.

So Rajesh, if it's okay with you, I'd like to switch gears a little bit. When you started Zoho and ManageEngine 30 years ago, 25 years ago, you probably weren't thinking about AI, right? Yeah.

And the impact it's going to have and the impact it's having on our world right now. But nevertheless, it's here, and as a good CEO and as you say, customer obsessed focused company, you've got to incorporate ... what's available, what the world is today.

So recently, ManageEngine has made several announcements. Right. A lot of it is around AI.

Mm-hmm. If you wouldn't mind, share with our audience- Right ... some of the news and announcements.

Of course. Yeah, I'll do that. Definitely, Alan, when we started in '96, '97, we didn't think about AI, but we did think, not only think, we started acting as early as in 2012 building AI because AI, as we know today, getting a lot of attention after these frontier models and generative AI and agentic AI, but AI has been available for a long time.

ManageEngine has had AI capabilities in our products since 2012, and we were applying artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning in domains like IT operations, service management, and cybersecurity. These are purpose-built models that could do very good forecasting, anomaly detection, things like that, right? And talking specifically about what's happening in the last three, four years, yeah, more than the hype, they are starting to deliver real good value.

Just the economics is in question. Will the token-based consumption model be sustainable is the question. So will we be able to find enough power is the question.

So we take a different approach coming from the philosophy that we have. How can we make AI a lot more efficient, right? So how can we make AI sustainable long term is how we think.

To that count, the recent stream of announcement that we have, this applies both to Zoho and ManageEngine. We are investing in building, hosting, and running our own models, which are purpose-built, right? So today, the frontier models that we have are awesome, but you don't need such a powerful model to run all your use cases.

Something very specific to IT, you should still be able to run with a narrower small language model that is purpose-built for a specific problem. A problem like root cause analysis or triaging, right? So it's very purpose-built.

It knows what to do. It knows the context. So what we have done in terms of becoming AI-ready and AI relevant in this age, we are very clear we are not in the race of building the next frontier model.

That is not our primary focus. But our focus is how do we help our customers best leverage AI? How do we become AI-ready?

How do we help our customers become AI-driven? So what we did is we have our own model. That is the default model our products will work with.

That gives our customers a lot of AI capability. When I say AI capabilities, it includes conversational intelligence, it includes generative intelligence, and also agentic. I'll give you a couple of examples in the realm of a CIO's organization, Alan.

So when something goes wrong, we always talk about how technology infrastructure is getting very heterogeneous, very complex, so hard to deal with. A lot of things residing on different types of hyperscalers and all that. The first thing you want to know when something goes wrong, so you're already handling a deluge of alerts and notifications.

How do you do effective triaging? What is the first problem I need to fix? This is where AI models could really help.

Our agents, the ManageEngine agents running on multiple of our products. A product like our full-stack observability will look into 20 different sources of alerts and notification and events coming in, and we have our service management platform that knows the entire asset posture of the organization. What are all my important components, right?

So where are these alerts coming from, and where is my downtime? And it is able to apply the intelligence to give a good visual triaging map, right? So this is where the problem could be, and these are the first two steps the team should address.

And in addition, it also gives you the ability to explain how it came with that triaging map, the additional option of executing the actions autonomously, right? So when I say autonomous, it's not 100% yet. An administrator has to read, understand the steps, and then approve, then the AI agent can go and do the action.

So this is one example. And the second example is when a cybersecurity incident happens or a operational incident happens, regulations mandate you need to do a complete root cause analysis. And doing this takes a lot of time again.

So you need to collect a lot of data points, get people's observations, opinions, draft it, review it, and this whole process could now be automated using agents. So because it is able to collect the right data points, leverage the power of the LLMs, and be able to generate a root cause analysis. So these are practically very useful use cases.

And we always talk about alert fatigue. So talk about a security operations center. Things are always blurring red.

But you want to know, again, which are the right alarms coming in. So what are the false positives? So you don't want to focus a lot of time there.

What is my most important problems? How do I respond to that? I need multiple recommendations.

I need analysis from the real world use cases. I can build an agent that can go crawl the internet, identify patterns. Something has happened inside your network.

Do I see a pattern, a learning from outside world that can be applied here? That is a case of AI agent that can be built inside ManageEngine. And how much am I paying for these hyperscalers?

Am I paying the right cost? Can I benchmark what I pay against similar companies like me? You can again create an agent that will go look into multiple data sources and tell you on a daily basis, are you overpaying?

Are you paying optimally? So this is the power. This is the capability, set of specific use cases that we have brought with ZIA Agents in ManageEngine, Alan.

Love it. Rajesh, we're over time. I just want to wrap things up.

com and we can get everything there. Absolutely. You can, yes.

Fantastic. Rajesh, thank you so much for coming on Techstrong TV. We really appreciate it.

Continued success. I don't know- Thank you ... 30 years, someone should throw a party for you, right?

Appreciate it and we hope to keep going. Thanks for the opportunity. Absolutely.

Appreciate it. All right. We're going to take a break here on Techstrong TV.

We'll be back in just a minute.