In an exclusive conversation with CXO News and APAC News Network, Abhijit Banerjee, MD India, and SAARC, Solarwinds outlines how AI has been a unique differentiator inITSM and Observability and how AIOps will drive its Hybrid Cloud Observability.
What are the solutions and services in the SolarWinds portfolio are currently available in the Indian market?
Since its founding 25 years ago, SolarWinds has diversified its product portfolio to deliver simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software. Be it monitoring, networking, databases, applications, and systems, our award-winning product portfolio covers all aspects of complex IT management across on-premises and multi-cloud environments for organizations worldwide – regardless of type, size, or complexity. Our products help clients be competitive as they navigate fast-evolving transformational changes and meet the growing demand for digital services in India.
How has SolarWinds incorporated AI to enhance its solutions and offerings? What other emerging technologies and innovations have been incorporated into the solutions, and what are their use cases?
We have been using AI in various forms since 2016. In one of our database management solutions, we use machine learning to spot anomalies. Over the years, technology has advanced, and we now use more complex mathematical models to compare dynamic data. Recently, we embedded an LLM to lower the stress on helpdesk teams and allow more automation for routine tasks.
As digital transformation accelerates across industries, what are SolarWinds’ unique differentiators in the competitive ITSM and Observability market?
To survive in a competitive market, you need to keep a finger on the pulse of the customer to keep in touch with the actual needs of the business. When we create our products, we ensure they play well with our existing portfolio, as most customers run more than just a single SolarWinds solution. For example, we expect them to spend less than weeks or months creating a bi-directional data exchange between our Observability and ITSM solution. It is ten mouse clicks. OK, maybe twelve. But you get the deal.
Which are the verticals that you are witnessing maximum traction on, and what are their use cases? How are you supporting these clients to modernize their IT infrastructure and operations?
While we could talk about global players stuck somewhere on their path of digital transformation, we discovered another trend. In the past three to four years, we have seen an increase in start-ups that have become successful companies. For obvious reasons, you do not emphasize topics like Observability when you start. However, you can only afford to lose a customer at a specific size if your web store or CSM system is acting up. That’s the point where organizations are approaching us, and they need support now and not next week.
What are the salient points of your GTM strategy and what are the key initiatives undertaken as part of this strategy?
Today’s hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments are increasingly complex and that means the jobs of IT teams who have to manage those environments are getting harder.
At SolarWinds, we understand the challenges our customers face and are committed to constantly evolving to meet their needs. This means we must provide solutions that make the job of managing complex environments simple for our customers. We have built on our more than 25 years of expertise in monitoring to offer customers powerful solutions that provide unified and comprehensive visibility for today’s distributed environments. Through our flexible observability solutions that uniquely integrate on-prem and cloud ecosystems into one holistic view, we can empower teams to monitor and observe complex environments anytime from anywhere.
Another key part of our strategy is leveraging our channel partners, who have been integral to our company’s success. That’s why we launched our Transform Partner Program and continue to evolve it to meet the changing needs of our customers. We’ve designed our channel program to accelerate growth and drive revenue for partners, including increased benefits and access to new revenue opportunities. This creates greater opportunities for shared growth by making it more straightforward for our partners to offer customers our world-class observability solutions so they can continue to scale to grow.
What is the status update on R&D innovations undertaken at SolarWinds?
As IT environments have become too complex for humans to manage alone, we have increasingly integrated Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into our products and solutions.
In the past year, we introduced transformative AI-powered enhancements to our SolarWinds Observability solutions to improve the user experience and increase performance through proactive issue detection and accelerated problem-solving. The new capabilities also include further enhancements to the company’s proven Infrastructure and Database Observability capabilities to provide greater unified visibility across hybrid on-prem and cloud ecosystems. Additionally, SolarWinds introduced AIOps-enabled pattern recognition and anomaly detection to provide insights into correlated alerts and events to accelerate root cause analysis, allowing IT teams to be more productive as the organization scales.
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability also continues to evolve to meet customer needs with the addition of AIOps capabilities. Our Hybrid Cloud Observability solution is powered by AIOps to continuously improve performance, availability, security, and digital experience across complex, diverse, and distributed hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
At SolarWinds, we evolve our business so our customers can achieve optimized and efficient operations within their networks.
How critical is the role of Observability in mitigating common risks in databases, IT management, and cybersecurity? How would SolarWinds solutions mitigate the challenges of these risks?
For many years now, we and others have said, “IT is getting more complex by the day,” and that’s, unfortunately, still true. Businesses’ requirements change at the same pace as the importance of IT for the organization. It’s crucial to stay on top of the ever-changing landscape and its challenges and offer solutions to these situations.
But what many people ignore is the human factor. We are looking at disparate teams with varying goals, headcounts, and budgets. In reality, the DBA is not interested in how the network is doing, to put it mildly. But, this approach needs to be corrected. IT is one team, a mutual goal, and only one customer — the business. So, what they need is one tool that everyone can use and that everyone understands. That ensures that the DBA will only be notified of a network issue when there’s a potential impact on the DB’s performance to stay within my example.
Looking ahead, what do you believe will be the most significant trends in IT management, and how is SolarWinds positioning itself to lead in this evolving landscape?
We do not need to polish our crystal balls to see the increasing impact of AI in IT.
But like with all new inventions in the past few centuries, there is light and shadow, different opinions, and multiple possible outcomes.
Here at SolarWinds, we revolutionized software development in 2021 and called it “Secure by Design,” and we are just about to do the same with AI.
We prioritize privacy and security over features. Yes, that means we won’t be the first to use new tech, but one thing is invaluable to us: our customers’ trust.
Rajneesh De, APAC News Network
