How is ManageEngine’s move toward a more unified platform changing how partners engage with customers?
Sujoy: The unified platform wasn’t an overnight decision; it was a long-term strategic vision that we’ve been building towards for years. Most vendors take the opposite approach: start with individual point products and stitch them together later. We did it differently. From the very beginning, the goal was to serve the complete IT requirements of any organisation, regardless of size, sector, or geography. Whether you’re a five-person IT team or an organisation with hundreds of thousands of users, like some of our largest customers in Saudi Arabia, the platform is designed to scale with you.
Nirmal: Over time, as we expanded to 60-plus products across four core verticals, it became clear that this wasn’t just a product portfolio. It was a complete IT solution. Customers enter through a single point, experience the value, and naturally expand across the portfolio. From their perspective, it’s a single-vendor approach: one relationship, one accountability, and a 360-degree solution for all their IT needs. The Middle East has always been a region that demands customisation, and our platform is built with that flexibility at its core, adaptable to the specific requirements of each customer without being dependent on any one sector or use case.
How is embedding AI across your solutions reshaping opportunities for channel partners?
Nirmal: AI adoption in this region is at an inflection point. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are very deliberate about data sovereignty: how data flows, where it resides, and how it’s processed. That creates both a challenge and an opportunity. Partners who can build AI capabilities on top of our management platform, or who can develop vertical-specific models, will find significant headroom to grow. The managed services layer is where a lot of that value will crystallise.
Sujoy: We’re not doing AI for the sake of it. It has been a core part of our product development for over a decade. We established our AI lab more than ten years ago, anticipating exactly the kind of transformation we’re seeing today. What’s changed is the pace and scale of adoption. The majority of our product development is driven by customer requirements, and AI will continue to be embedded more deeply across the entire portfolio in response to what customers are asking for. It’s an ongoing process, not a one-time feature release.
What new capabilities or business models is ManageEngine enabling for MSPs as managed services demand grows?
Sujoy: Honestly, we’re still in the early stages of this journey for MSPs. Our products have historically been built with end customers in mind, and we’re now working to develop purpose-built MSP versions across our product verticals. It can’t be a single product adapted for MSPs, the architecture and business model are fundamentally different. We’re working through both the technical and commercial dimensions of that, and should have something remarkable in the next twelve months. The market expectation is high, and we’re building towards it.
With IT and security increasingly converging, how is ManageEngine helping partners address both through a single engagement?
Sujoy: Security is no longer a separate workstream, it runs through everything. Service management, operations management, endpoint management, security is embedded in all of it. Over the last two years in particular, we’ve concentrated heavily on making every product more secure by design, and that thinking extends to how we train and enable our partners.
When we work with partners today, there are two parallel tracks, IT management and Security, and they run together, not sequentially. We’ve seen this play out in our partner training sessions as well: the same people completing the service management track are also completing the security track. The knowledge transfer is integrated because the customer requirement is integrated. Security is not an add-on. It’s a foundation.
What do these developments mean specifically for channel partners in the MENA region?
Nirmal: One of the real challenges in the region today is that major AI infrastructure, the large language models, the processing capabilities, is still largely not hosted locally within the UAE or Saudi Arabia. That creates a genuine limitation for data-sensitive use cases. Governments have ambitions to change that, and we fully expect local AI infrastructure to mature. But right now, it remains a constraint.
What we can offer today is meaningful: our products come with the right AI and LLM models already integrated, and we have local GPU infrastructure as part of our data centre ecosystem. That means we’re able to deliver localised AI capabilities that keep data within the region, which is increasingly what customers and regulators expect.
Sujoy: We now have our 19th and 20th data centres, two of them sitting side by side in neighbouring countries in this region. That’s unprecedented globally for us. Saudi Arabia and the UAE each have their own full-stack Zoho data centres, and the localisation goes far deeper than just data residency. The models used to architect these data centres have been built using local integrations and local frameworks, modules that wouldn’t be appropriate for other geographies have been removed, and locally relevant ones have been built in their place. That level of true localisation is something we take seriously, and I believe it’s a very strong message for both customers and partners in the region.
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