Saudi Arabia is one of the leading markets for our business today, not only in the Middle East but also globally, said Nirmal Kumar Manoharan, regional sales director, ManageEngine, at the LEAP22 event about his company’s strategy for growth in a highly competitive market like Smaudi Arabia. “We have been doing business in the KSA for 18 years now and have steadily grown our customer base to emerge as a top IT management vendor in the region. Along with our customer base, many of our partners, most of whom have been with us right from the beginning, have also grown. “They have been able to invest and develop many skilled professionals who are today the bedrock of our business in Saudi Arabia. This structure that we built to serve the market through local partners has given a sense of continuity in ManageEngine"s operations in the region and has earned customers" trust. We intend to continue strengthening this structure.” He also spoke on other issues. Here are the excerpts: Q: Why is it important for you to be at LEAP and what are you showcasing at the show? A: We, at ManageEngine, are really excited to be a part of Riyadh"s largest-ever technology conference. We believe the event will immensely help us increase our reach and visibility in the region and also establish us as a viable, credible and long term player in the market. We not only look forward to highlighting our latest capabilities in the IT management and security suite, but also demonstrate the need for compliance and how our solutions can help organizations achieve the same. We will also showcase our comprehensive solutions in IT operations management, identity and access management, and IT analytics that help resolve customer problems especially in hybrid technology infrastructures. As the region is seeing an increased cloud adoption, we will specifically focus on showcasing our cloud offerings. Q: The Saudi Arabia market is at the fore front of digital transformation. How is ManageEngine helping organizations achieve their digital transformation goals? A: Digital transformation has become a top priority for organizations in Saudi Arabia and those who realise its importance often focus on the following three aspects. • The value transformation where the business must invent a completely new business model that offers more value at less cost and is relevant to the current day and age. • The ability to operate in a totally decentralised fashion, yet the overall performance of the business should be optimal and meet the stated objectives. •The unrelenting focus on understanding the changes in customer expectations and doing every bit to enhance it every day. Any business transformation should start with such fundamentals and then look at how to leverage what the current technology has to offer to enable this transformation. ManageEngine understands this approach and is building capabilities across the product portfolio to help businesses address the evolving challenges. Along with our other division Zoho, we are committed to building a comprehensive suite of applications that covers the end-to-end of not only IT management, but the entire business applications space. Our products offer a seamless user experience with contextual integration that remove a lot of barriers for technology transformation within the business. Applications that seamlessly and securely cross the boundaries of various lines of businesses, help the employees and end users alike, in providing the right information at the right time and context, truly empowering them to be productive. The company has and will continue to invest heavily in R&D of new-age technologies like AI and ML that power individual products to solve specific business problems. Q: What do you think are the biggest trends that will transform the Middle East region this year? A: The Middle East IT landscape has seen a significant transformation since the pandemic and will continue to see cybersecurity, AI, automation, and analytics at the forefront of supporting and enabling this transformation. Hybrid working will be an expectation if not the norm among employees at least for the next two years. Hence, we expect to see more organisations embrace cloud and remote work management solutions this year. With data protection gaining more importance, more Middle East countries will ramp up their regulatory oversight by implementing strong data privacy frameworks and strictly uphold compliance. Q: What demand do you see for your solutions in Saudi Arabia? A: The region is a key market for all our products, especially our comprehensive suite of products for IT service management and operations management. We have, especially over the last two years, seen a significant increase in demand for our unified endpoint management and security solutions. With employees preferring a hybrid work model in the long term, our cloud solutions are also seeing a growing demand in the region. Since 2021, our IT analytics solution is also picking interest among organisations in Saudi Arabia as they seek actionable real time insights in order to gain competitive advantage. — SG