“Being a provider of IT tools alone will not do. Such tools will have to be aligned with business and focus on end to end coverage for the customer, notwithstanding ease of use,” said Sridhar Iyengar, Vice President, ManageEngine.

In a chat with Business Line, he said that ManageEngine, the older division of Zoho Corporation and provider of IT management tools realtime, has commenced the integration of its applications with Zoho's cloud-based business app to push IT-business alignment to new levels.

Emphasising the need for such an integration, he said the future of IT “is intersection of technology and business”.

'Relentless advances in cloud computing, mobility and other technologies have opened up newer opportunities; it is also a huge challenge for end-user organizations if they have to deal with different IT vendors as the solutions might be functionally disconnected, exist in silos. In such situations, IT teams might take longer time to act on new opportunities. This in turn would hamper business productivity and continuity as they watch opportunities slip away,' he explained, justifying the integration.

Stating that Zoho Corporation is uniquely positioned to deliver that suite as Zoho.com (the other independent division) is the operating system for business, he said “working more closely with Zoho will help ManageEngine develop, deploy, manage and secure business critical applications.”

ManageEngine has built more than 90 IT management applications and tools and built over 1.30 lakh organisations.

Sridhar said such contextual integrations have been created for its desk, desktop, mobile devices and operations management solutions till date and the IT community has caught a glimpse of this alignment through Analytics Plus, which is ManageEngine's IT analytics platform.

The company would come up with a solution later this month. The solution would unite one of ManageEngine's IT management applications with customer account management and billing applications from Zoho.

“Zoho is well-positioned for India. In fact, our growth here is higher than our growth in the overseas markets. Though late, the market in India is growing fast,” he said without quantifying.

That's not all. ManageEngine has refreshed its website and logo, signalling closer affinity with Zoho. The expanded ManageEngine-Zoho relationship is expected to push IT-business alignment to new levels.

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