Interview with Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of Research, ManageEngine

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us. You may be looking for ways to make your company more successful, organized, cost-effective, and better able to respond to evolving consumer demands now more than ever. Artificial intelligence, specifically, AI-driven automation is assisting businesses in accomplishing all of this and more.

ManageEngine is a company that has revolutionized IT management solutions with the help of AI to optimize your business processes and drive digital transformation.

In an interview with Analytics Insight, Director of Research of ManageEngine, Mr. Ramprakash Ramamoorthy shares how AI is helping in revolutionizing his products and services, how it is benefiting the organizations and much more.

Analytics Insight: AI is projected to be the next market. How is AI contributing to the improvement of your products and services?

Mr. Ramprakash: Building in-depth technical know-how has been the primary focus at ManageEngine ever since its inception. We've built our tech stack from the ground up: Everything from data centers to our AI features was built in-house. This gives us an edge over competitors and lets us pass on the value directly to our customers.

We have AI-assisted UEBA capabilities in our security information and event management stack, and have built powerful forecasting and anomaly techniques in our monitoring stack to help IT managers forecast events and look back to spot anomalous root causes of issues. We've also launched a plethora of natural language processing features in our service delivery stack, including chatbots, smart agent assignment, and ticket topic detection, to ensure maximum agent productivity.

Analytics Insight:  How has covid-19 influenced in the rising demand for AI among organizations?

Mr. Ramprakash: Pandemic-induced lockdowns have accelerated digitization across industries by forcing organizations to optimize their infrastructure to work from home or reach customers via digital channels. A substantial amount of data is generated in the process of digitization, and businesses should take this opportunity to use that data to their competitive advantage. AI can help organizations better understand customer sentiment, implement more effective product positioning, offer faster customer support resolutions, and more to optimize their processes and accelerate their revenue growth.

Analytics Insight:  How is AI helping organizations address security challenges?

In general, AI helps organizations to be more proactive than reactive in responding to threats. A few specific use cases include:

• Continuously monitoring user and entity behavior to identify insider threats early.
• Identifying any aberrations in monitored metrics.
• Forecasting potential security threats that could negatively disrupt IT infrastructure.
• Identifying if a file exhibits malicious intent.
• Identifying tools that fake identities to exfiltrate sensitive data.

Analytics Insight: Would you like to highlight a few use cases where analytics has benefited the organization tremendously?

Mr. Ramprakash: Our entire IT infrastructure is managed using ManageEngine solutions, and our AI features are also extensively used internally. In fact, we beta test many of our models before public adoption. We've seen how AI can maximize productivity and optimize our processes.

For example, let's say there's a potential spike in the latency of our servers; our monitoring platform utilizes the anomaly detection engine to report an anomaly and forecast a potential outage. The security platform also raises an alert for unusual traffic hitting our servers, and both of these events are generated as tickets in the service delivery tool. The natural language processing capabilities in the service delivery tool identify the context and assign the ticket to the most suitable available person for immediate intervention. The service delivery tool also recommends a probable solution from the listed knowledge base.

This is how AI adds tremendous value to our own IT: It looks at multiple signals from a variety of data sources and helps the IT team optimize processes and enhance the customer experience.

Analytics Insight: Can you elaborate on ManageEngine's R&D plans for the Indian market for the future ahead?

Mr. Ramprakash: We have teams working on research and development for problems with databases, hardware acceleration, AI, and blockchain. We have three teams specifically researching statistical machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing, with nearly 100 engineers working across these divisions. Our most exciting AI projects include UEBA, outage prediction, electronic know your customer, and root cause analysis. We're continuously investing in techniques like explanation-ready AI, transfer learning, causal AI, and privacy-first AI; some of these are patent pending, too. The blockchain team is currently working on deeper cryptographic principles.

Analytics Insight: What does your technology and business roadmap look for the rest of the year?

Mr. Ramprakash: Due to the acceleration in digitization, there will be increased adoption of IT infrastructure management software. We endeavor to build products using cutting-edge tech to optimize performance, improve customer satisfaction, and maximize our customers' revenue. Keeping in mind the need for AI to bring the best out of humans and not supplant them, we'd like to build smarter solutions with AI enhancements to even the smallest of touch points.