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As India’s cyber landscape expands—with remote work, IoT, and AI-driven attacks being on the rise—endpoint security has become the first and most vulnerable line of defence. The numbers tell the story: the endpoint security market in India is expected to grow to $251 million by 2025, with EDR adoption growing at an astronomical 28% CAGR. While growth has accelerated, a thoughtful differentiated approach is necessary to avoid panic-driven reactions.
Romanus Prabhu Raymond, Director of Technology at ManageEngine (Zoho Corp) is focused on a proactive protection strategy. As the company moves into its second-largest and fastest growing market, he talks about layers of defence, AI-native tools, and customer-enabled design that are changing the meaning of resilient IT security—especially for enterprises trying to balance cost, compliance, and complexity.
India is the second-largest market for ManageEngine. What’s driving that growth, and is there a roadmap ahead?
Yes, India is now our second-largest market globally—and growing fast. Our broad portfolio caters to businesses of all sizes, managing everything from identity and endpoints to data and infrastructure. This ability to replace multiple point tools with a unified, AI-powered stack is driving adoption, especially among Indian enterprises and MSMEs who value our homegrown roots. In fact, we saw 18% YoY growth in Q2 FY24–25, with strong momentum.
Which industries are showing the most interest in your solutions within India?
We see strong demand across verticals, but the top ones in India would be healthcare, education, BFSI (banking and financial services), IT services, and manufacturing. For example, we work closely with AU Small Finance Bank, Aavas Finance, and others in the BFSI segment.
From my role in Endpoint Management, I can tell you these customers typically start with endpoint management, and then gradually adopt other modules. That’s a common pattern—once they see value in one product, they begin expanding their usage across our portfolio.
Interestingly, people who move between organizations often bring ManageEngine with them. That kind of organic growth—through customer trust and word-of-mouth—has been key for us, especially before large-scale marketing and ad campaigns started.
You’ve overseen UEM and security for several years. With AI and ML becoming mainstream, how are enterprises evolving—and how are you keeping up?
Enterprises are evolving as compliance and security demands tighten. In endpoint management—and across IT—the focus is shifting to layered defense. First, address known vulnerabilities flagged by regulations like GDPR or HIPAA. Next, uncover hidden threats using visibility tools. Finally, tackle unknown anomalies with advanced detection. By resolving issues early, we reduce noise and sharpen focus on real threats. While detect-and-respond is important, our strategy prioritizes proactive measures like patching and hardening to stay ahead.
Enterprises often use multiple vendors for different security layers. How do your products integrate into such environments, and what are the challenges?
Many of our customers use tools from vendors like Okta, Zscaler, and Microsoft. We follow a dual strategy: offering equivalent products to replace existing ones, and integrating seamlessly with other ecosystems. We don’t push rip-and-replace—instead, we prove value first, then expand.
Our local presence, cost-effective support, and ongoing enablement—like webinars and health checks—build the trust that drives adoption, especially in markets like India.
Can you share a real-world example where Endpoint Management helped prevent or mitigate a serious threat?
During the WannaCry ransomware outbreak, one of our UK customers stayed fully protected—simply because they consistently used our patching tools. It’s a clear example of how proactive security, not just incident response, makes the difference. Most metrics focus on post-incident damage, but avoiding breaches altogether is the real ROI. A recent study even suggests calculating savings based on prevented attacks—an area where our preventive approach truly delivers.
How are you managing all of this together? It seems like customer success really completes the loop.
Customer success today goes beyond support—it's a strategic function that connects pre-sales, support, engineering, and product teams. It ensures proactive problem-solving, continuous feedback, and stronger retention. For enterprise clients, we showcase success with clear metrics and real-world use cases to make our value tangible.
What’s your current customer success rate, and how do you measure it?
We have nearly 90% customer retention, but true success is measured by expansion—how many customers adopt more products over time. That signals real ROI. We track this through service metrics like responsiveness and references, as well as revenue-based indicators, all tied to usage and impact.
AI agents are the trend right now. Is ManageEngine building something similar in security?
Yes, we’re already moving in that direction. We’re working on a single intelligent agent that proactively manages a range of tasks across our product suite.
This includes:
- Helpdesk ticket resolution
- Remote troubleshooting
- Endpoint patching
- User experience monitoring
- Threat detection and response
Unlike some vendors who build through acquisitions, our advantage is that all our IP is developed in-house, in India. That allows us seamless integration across functions. It’s a major edge—one agent, one ecosystem, no bolt-ons.
You’ve mentioned your customer success stands out. What differentiates you from other global players?
There are a few things:
Support experience: Many global brands have limited local presence. You might wait hours or even days for support—and pay extra for it.
Licensing flexibility: Others often bundle everything under one umbrella license—you pay for the whole stack even if you use only a fraction. We offer flexible licensing with modular pricing.
Continuous listening: We actively listen to our customers and integrate their feedback quickly. It’s not just feature requests—it’s co-innovation.
How are you embedding AI and automation in your products today?
AI isn’t a bolt-on for us—it’s embedded across operations. Take patch management: instead of just using severity scores, we use AI to assess context and risk exposure.
For example, a travelling employee faces more risk than someone working from home, so their system gets priority. The same applies to threat detection—AI builds behavioural baselines and flags anomalies with context, enabling smarter, faster responses.
With threat actors also using AI, how do you stay ahead?
You fight technology with technology. That’s why we focus on strategy first, then tools.
Just like you don't treat fever—you treat the infection causing it—we don't just respond to alerts. We analyze the strategy behind an attack. Not every alert is actionable, and not every alert should be ignored. AI helps, but human judgment and layered defense are still critical.
We emphasize context-aware detection, where AI helps determine whether a deviation is truly malicious or just an anomaly worth watching.
Why do we only talk about security when something goes wrong? Isn’t good management invisible by design?
Most people measure security by incidents—cost of breach, reputational damage, penalties. But no one asks, "What’s the cost of being secure?"
We’re now seeing a shift. Analysts and enterprises are beginning to quantify the savings from prevention. If you had zero incidents last year, what did you save? That needs recognition, and we are helping build those metrics into our value reports.
As a known security evangelist, what trends or technologies are you most excited about over the next 2–3 years?
I’m particularly excited about the maturing of detection and response systems. Today, SOC teams are flooded with alerts—many of which are false positives or context-free.
The future lies in evolving from "What is happening?" to "Why is it happening?"
For example, a finance user may delay a patch because of critical accounting work. AI needs to understand that and recommend accordingly—not flag it as a violation.
This deeper contextualization is where machine learning will shine. The more structured the data, the better the intelligence. That’s where the biggest evolution will happen.
What motivates you personally to drive customer and employee success at scale?
For me, customer success is ecosystem success. It creates a feedback loop that benefits everyone—products improve, processes evolve, employees grow, and customers gain.
The telemetry we gather from customer interactions, support touchpoints, and Dex operations shapes the roadmap. It’s incredibly fulfilling to see this orchestration succeed across teams and geographies.
Finally, what advice would you give to emerging leaders managing large-scale customer operations?
Don’t chase tools to fix problems. Understand the business need first, craft a strategy, and then align the tools accordingly. Strategy should drive the tooling, not the other way around.
As organizations become more compliance-driven and data-sensitive, roles like CISO, Digital Officers, and Data Privacy Leads are only going to expand. Emerging leaders should think cross-functionally—understand risk, compliance, technology, and user behavior holistically.