ManageEngine expands in the UK and Ireland as it deepens its global footprint

At ExCeL London last week, ManageEngine, the IT management division of Zoho Corporation, announced a major expansion across the United Kingdom and Ireland. The region is now the company’s second-largest market worldwide, accounting for ten per cent of global revenue and growing at twenty per cent year on year.

For CEO Rajesh Ganesan, the success in the UK and Ireland is both strategic and symbolic. “These markets have always been early adopters of technology,” he says. “They were among the first to invest in large-scale digital infrastructure. Today, the focus is on how to get the best return on those investments, how to keep systems running, how to measure productivity, and how to stay secure.”

ManageEngine growth planned for the UK and Ireland

Security is now central to ManageEngine’s business. As more companies move to hybrid or fully digital operations, the attack surface expands. Regulations such as GDPR have also raised the stakes. “Regulation is really about evidence,” Ganesan explains. “You must always be ready to show that you follow best practices, who has access to what, what happened, and when. That’s what our products do. They make that evidence available in real time.”

ManageEngine operates in 190 countries and has evolved with the industry it serves. Founded in 1996 by engineers who left Bell Labs and Qualcomm to return to India, the original business built software for telecom manufacturers. After the dotcom collapse in 2001, the company pivoted, deciding to build software that could manage any IT infrastructure, not just those of telcos. That decision gave birth to ManageEngine.

“We wanted to build a global product company out of India,” Ganesan says. “Why should innovation only come from Silicon Valley?”

From ten employees in 1996, ManageEngine has grown to a team of six thousand within Zoho’s eighteen thousand–strong organisation. The company’s core customers are CIOs and IT leaders responsible for keeping modern enterprises secure, compliant, and operational. “Every business today is a digital business,” Ganesan says. “Our role is to help them manage that reality.”

The firm’s growth is driven by its end-to-end model. Rather than offering point solutions, ManageEngine provides a single integrated platform covering service management, cybersecurity, compliance, and automation. “Our customers don’t want to manage multiple vendors,” Ganesan says. “They want one system of record. That’s been our vision from the beginning.”

ManageEngine competes across several categories, from ServiceNow and Atlassian in IT service management to Microsoft in endpoint control, but Ganesan is careful not to define the company purely by competition. “We’ve always built rather than acquired,” he says. “Our technology, support, and cloud infrastructure are all in-house. We even run our own data centres. It’s slower, yes, but it keeps us close to our customers and their challenges.”

That proximity is both cultural and operational. ManageEngine’s technical support sits alongside its engineering teams; they travel together, visit customers, and feed insights directly into product development.

“We don’t outsource,” Ganesan says simply. “We believe in face-to-face interaction. Our customers tell us again and again how much they value that.”

The UK office is in Milton Keynes, and the company operates data centres in the UK, Amsterdam, and Ireland,  an investment that proved essential after Brexit.

“When the UK left the EU, certain clients, especially in government and healthcare, required data to be hosted locally,” Ganesan explains. “We responded immediately by building the infrastructure here.”

An Irish office is likely to follow. “It makes sense,” he says. “We already have a data centre there and a growing customer base. Ireland will be an important part of our regional expansion.”

The company’s long-term approach is deliberate. ManageEngine prioritises resilience over speed, preferring to build self-sufficient systems with minimal external dependency.

“Technology can fail,” Ganesan says. “It’s about how many layers of resilience you build. We prefer to keep things simple, fewer dependencies, more control.”

Global uncertainty, from tariffs to geopolitical shifts, has also influenced the company’s structure. “No one escapes these changes,” he says. “At one point, North America was over eighty per cent of our revenue. We’ve since diversified deliberately. Every region, Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, has dedicated teams and local leadership. It’s about balance and long-term commitment.”

That sense of purpose extends into culture. ManageEngine’s offices are open plan, its hierarchy flat. Employees can walk in with ideas or criticism.

“We encourage hallway conversations,” Ganesan says. “Feedback must flow freely, it’s how we improve. We accept mistakes; what matters is transparency.”

When asked about his own travel schedule, he smiles. “I’m on the road about half the year,” he says. “The other half I spend with the team in Chennai. We don’t have closed offices. Everyone can speak to anyone. It’s how we stay agile.”

As our conversation winds down, Ganesan turns reflective. He speaks about travel, culture, and contrast, about how history and noise shape societies. “In Rome, I felt something familiar,” he says. “The sense of history, of old architecture, of people still connected to their past. That’s like southern India, you walk in any direction, and you’ll find a thousand-year-old temple.”

Japan, however, offered something entirely different. “It’s the only country where I truly felt alien,” he says. “On a crowded train, there’s complete silence. Everyone is polite, disciplined, and calm. Then you come to India, equally crowded, equally full of energy, but full of sound. ”

“Both are human,” he says. “They just express it differently.”

That balance between structure and energy, between order and expression, is what ManageEngine aims to achieve in its three Ws — Work, Workforce, and Workspace — keeping systems efficient while never losing the human pulse that drives them.

See more breaking stories here.