Rajesh Ganesan is not your typical cybersecurity CEO. Most leaders hop from business to business. Ganesan has been at ManageEngine, and parent company Zoho, for close to 30 years.
Why has Ganesan stuck with one company for so long? Well, ManageEngine is not a typical cybersecurity vendor.
From their company HQ in Chennai, India, ManageEngine serves more than 280,000 organizations, nine of every ten Fortune 100 organizations, operates 18 data centres, maintains 20 global offices, and works with over 200 channel partners worldwide.
ManageEngine now offers more than 65 different enterprise solutions, including security controls like ISM, IAM, and Observability. They have never made any acquisitions, and they’ve never raised any cash from private investment.
ManageEngine, and Rajesh himself, has a point to prove. They can do IT security better by building their own tools and by focusing on development and competitive pricing over marketing hype.
Expert Insights had the chance to meet Ganesan at ManageEngine’s annual UserConf in London this week.
Here’s what he told us about running a cybersecurity business, the tech market in India, and what’s next for ManageEngine.
You’ve worked with ManageEngine and Zoho Networks for over 28-years. What got you into this company, and what has made you stick around?
I started in January 1997. I was doing my post-graduation; I had to do an internship. Famously I’ve never written a resume in my life.
The founders of [Zoho Corporation] were in the US working for big telcom companies. So that’s when they had this spark: why should big tech innovation only happen from the Bay area? Why can’t we build it from India? So, they came back.
I happened to meet them right out of college. We were less than 10 people. We were growing like 200%, 300% at one point, but suddenly in six months, the market disappears. We realized we had to increase our customer base.
Manage Engine was founded with the pivotal idea: Don’t sell to an industry of 50 customers, sell to an industry of 50,000 customers. We had the knowledge and ability to build systems that can manage a complex infrastructure. So we went after any company that had an IT team. That is the start of ManageEngine.
I was five years into the company, programming. When we did the pivot, I started thinking about ManageEngine, strategizing about what we could do. That’s how the journey started. I played a lot of roles, started as a programmer, then product manager, I did customer support, I did pre-sales, a lot of things. This year, I took over the role of CEO at ManageEngine.
What keeps you excited about working for ManageEngine?
We build our own stack. We never raised external capital. We never acquire companies. We don’t host our products on any external cloud. Our data center infrastructure is completely built by us. We just rent the physical space, power, and cooling. From the most basic hardware, it’s all built by us.
We do this for several reasons. One, is we should understand what it means to build and run a cloud infrastructure. Then we can build software that can manage what our customers have.
We also are able to give the commitment about privacy and security to our customers. Their data stays only in our infrastructure. These are some of the values, principles that drive ManageEngine.
Why have I stayed 28, 29 years in this company? I’ve been able to reinvent myself every three years from a programmer, from all of that. I had two options, switch jobs, or switch roles inside the company.
It’s been a fantastic ride. We’re from the south of India. In the mid 90s, nobody would have given us a chance. We didn’t know. We were taking a big shot at it, one day at a time, one month at a time, here we are.
Today we have done business with 190 countries. The UN recognizes 195 countries. About 300,000 customers served over the last 23 years, data centers in 18 countries. So it’s been a great growth story.
That would tell you why I stuck around. It’s been very fulfilling. Building the team, a team of passionate people who wanted to contribute to a cause. That’s been our story.
We don’t follow any textbook. I don’t think our textbook can be applied to anyone else. It works for us. I always say if we were starting today, we don’t know where it would go. But we have a story to tell today.
You mentioned about founding in Southern India and how that wasn’t known as a tech hub. But now, the Indian economy has grown massively in the tech space. What are your thoughts on this changes?
I’ve been in the technology industry last 28-29 years. India started late. It was always North America, along with the UK. They were early adopters of technology, early adopters of all innovation.
The last 5-6 years, things are changing. In the US, in the UK, a lot of investment has already gone into building the infrastructure. It’s so hard to move away from what you have already built. You’re stuck with legacy.
Whereas countries like India, Africa, Latin America, we started late. For example, we never spoke too much about 2G, 3G. We jumped to building 4G, 5G.
The digital maturity in India has grown tremendously, because we could start with the most cutting-edge technology infrastructure. So that is driving our growth.
Because once you build this infrastructure, you need to make sure it’s up and running. It’s delivering service to the intended audience, cyber security, compliance, all of that. That is what we provide to our customers. North America by far is our biggest market. UK number 2. But India will soon overtake the UK.
We’re chatting at ManageEngine’s two-day London User Conference. You do these events all over the world, Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Las Vegas. What do you get out of them, and how does it help ManageEngine’s mission?
As a company, we build all the technology ourselves. Because we want to know what it is to build such technology. Where is the source of what problems we need to solve? It’s our customers.
As a company, we intentionally don’t overmarket ourselves. By principle, our marketing budget caps at 18% of the revenue. You see startups sometimes go up to 65, 70% of sales-marketing expenses.
We keep it to 18% as a matter of principle. The biggest budget allocation goes to development. So that would explain why we are able to price the products affordably for value.
Because we don’t market ourselves very aggressively, we do events like this. We intentionally keep the number [of attendees] to 400 people. [ManageEngine] have 100 people here. For every four customers, there’ll be one person from ManageEngine who’s been engaging with them.
This is User Conference 17 for this year. Which is more than one per month. The reason we do it is we want to have this direct intimate close conversations with our customers.
And it’s not just these events, we are opening offices across the world to be close to our customers and partners. Again, it’s matter of principle. Our teams sit together, the development team, the customer support team, the sales team. We don’t want to outsource any of these functions.
This is a model we want to carry forward, right? We don’t want to alienate ourselves; we don’t want to over market ourselves, over-promise. This is the organic way of growth that we will continue to pursue.
It works for us. I mean, make no mistake, we cannot operate in isolation. We will not by ourselves know all the problems that we need to solve.
While customer-focused, ManageEngine is highly ambitious. Zoho’s founder Sridhar Vembu said in 2023 that ManageEngine could reach $1 billion in revenue within two to three years. How is that ambition progressing, and what’s driving the growth?
We are on track. We are a privately held company. We are not disclosing revenue, but we have become big. We crossed a billion dollars in revenue for the company [Zoho] two years ago, 2023.
ManageEngine as a division will cross a billion dollars by itself in next year, 2026 or 2027. We are getting there very close.
Fantastic. My last question: You’ve talked about the journey that you’ve had. What excites you today and what excites you about the future?
It’s simple. ManageEngine predates Gmail. Gmail came in 2004, and we were there in 2002. We have seen many technology disruptions come and stay, come and go. Our ability to stay relevant to all these disruptions and still have customers come to us, seek us, is that is most exciting.
We have seen cloud, virtualization, mobility come and go, the power of social networks, blockchain, the metaverse. Now AI, machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, agentic AI.
We are never a company to fall for the hype. We look for what the technology can offer us. We also have a deep understanding of what our customers need. This is also the reason we want to run our own infrastructure. It’s easy to outsource everything. We don’t outsource anything.
So right from development to operations to running our own cloud to doing our own compliance, doing our own legal, everything is in house.
Staying relevant is what is the most exciting. How do we leverage what AI has to offer today. It’s a completely new way of thinking. What will be the evolution of ManageEngine when all these forces act on us?
So, every two years, like I said, there is a personal reinvention. There is a business reinvention that goes too. That’s the most exciting part.
Technology excites you in a very different way because you are never sure of how much you should invest, or what you should bet on. We make bets, but we are never too excited.
So, the excitement is about keeping your calm, as they say in the UK. Keep calm and carry on.
