Advances In Business-IT Alignment

Great speaking with Raj Sabhlok, president of ManageEngine regarding its strategy for advancing the state of IT management and aligning IT with business objectives with their parent company, Zoho Corporation. ManageEngine will integrate Zoho’s cloud-based business apps with its suite of IT management software. ManageEngine will continue to evolve its applications based on lessons gained from managing the Zoho Cloud, one of the largest public clouds in the world, and will continue to work on the contextual integration of the ManageEngine suite.

Advances in cloud computing, mobility, and other technologies are creating new opportunities and challenges for end-user organizations. However, IT teams are often hamstrung by multi-vendor IT management solutions that are functionally disconnected from each other and isolated from the rest of the organization. In turn, IT teams and business units grow further out of sync as IT teams take longer to act on new opportunities while business productivity and continuity suffer, leaving business units to watch opportunities slip away.

“The future of IT is the intersection of technology and business,” said Raj. “Most IT decisions are being made at the line of business or are being influenced at the line of business. IT teams need a suite of integrated tools that can help them work at that level, and we are uniquely qualified to deliver that suite. Zoho is the operating system for business and lives at the line of business. Working even more closely with Zoho puts ManageEngine where we need to be — helping to develop, deploy, manage and secure these critical business applications.”

Bringing IT Together 

ManageEngine has built more than 90 IT management applications and free tools. Taken together, the suite provides everything an IT department needs to affordably manage all of its IT operations, from networks and servers to applications, service desk, Active Directory, security, desktops, and mobile devices.

In its efforts to improve IT manageability, ManageEngine has already begun contextually integrating many of its applications, sharing data across applications, and enabling IT pros to perform relevant functions of one application from the UI of another. To date, such contextual integrations have been created for its desk, desktop, mobile device, and operations management solutions.

The expanded ManageEngine-Zoho relationship will push IT-business alignment to new levels. The IT community has already caught a glimpse of this alignment in the form of Analytics Plus, ManageEngine’s self-service IT analytics platform that is powered by Zoho’s business technology.

Later this month, the company will roll out a solution that unites one of its IT management applications with customer account management and billing apps from Zoho. Going forward, the two companies will deliver other integrations to help organizations tightly align their IT operations and business strategies. Meanwhile, IT teams can leverage Zoho Creator, the low-code app development platform, to rapidly build and launch custom, mobile-ready apps.