Embrace Flexibility to Attain Business Process and IT Cohesion

As a vendor, we can help to future-proof some of their investments. For instance, to migrate all the applications to the cloud from on-prem would at least take three to four years, but CIOs have to make technology decisions now. Our ability to provide CIOs with the licensing mechanisms and deployment flexibility that they can utilize on-prem today, and enabling them to look forward to the transition of the cloud, helps keep us aligned and involved in their thinking for the future.

What is your approach to identifying the right partners for the business?

For management automation and provisioning, we take a central vision-based approach that enables you to predict what is going on in your network. A lot of the application management vendors are great at telling you what is “happening after” and will help you to identify where it is. Our approach is to get more in-depth analytics and find out “what is happening in the application right now.” If we can get information available on “current happening” in the application, operating with AI tools, we can predict future problems. That will help in shortening repair time and bring our customers closer to the idea of always-on AX. From a messaging perspective, it allows us to create a niche for ourselves, which has taken us beyond the load balancer or application delivery controller (ADC), enabling us to look deeper at the challenges that CIOs face. In turn, this helps those CIOs make better decisions about the vendors they work with.

According to you, what would be the best strategy to align new systems with legacy systems for better business outcomes?

It is all around the migration and the transition period. At Kemp, we have always put the customer first with maximum flexibility and value. Our products and software solutions are compatible with any legacy solutions, supporting either legacy hardware or the different virtual approaches. We support all the common hypervisors, significant clouds, and public cloud providers in the market, and we take this to the next level by helping with the migration process, as some may be looking to migrate over time from one to the other. Red Hat, VMware and Microsoft are some of our key partnerships and ecosystems that we support.

Any projects or that you have been a part of, especially in the APAC region in the recent past?

We have been active in the APAC region, and we primarily focus on markets in Southeast Asia, Greater China, and the Indian subcontinent. We have acquired a small business established as Kemp India, which turned out to be quite profitable. Among the active customers we are working with right now in APAC include a few of our largest customers globally. One of our clients in Indonesia, Wowrack, has built Kemp into its own data center as part of building out a new infrastructure. And, when they were building solutions for customers to offer in Indonesia, they use Kemp as a part of their provisioning system. Our product and licensing model suited them ideally because of our flexible approach with the option to bill their customers on a per-month, pay-as-you-go basis. We provided them with billing in the background based on that utility. There is no upfront investment from us to the vendor or from the vendor to the customer. It’s a win-win.

Could you talk about some of the personality traits that reflect in your leadership strategy when you work with a team?

It comes down to our culture. By focusing on core principles, respect, and leadership, our organization has built a strong leadership layer over the years. We work with the executives, extended leadership team, and everybody that has leadership responsibility across different departments. This is an ongoing effort and done as a collective about six-to-eight times every year to provide information around the strategy. This way, we also get valuable insights from their experience and can build those into our own thinking going forward. This helps to get the message out to the rest of the organization, allowing us to maintain consistency across our goals. Taking a customer-centric approach, we have also built a huge support team to gain customer loyalty and we pride ourselves on having one of the highest customer support scores in our market. For instance, our legacy had been very much focused on small-to-medium businesses, but many of those types of businesses have now become large enterprises and stayed with us throughout their journey.

Any piece of advice that you would like to give to a peer or CIO in this particular space?

Research well before making decisions for the long term. Understand the business of your clients before offering them solutions or services. This will save time for you, as well as for your customers. Talking to numerous customers helps in building analysis and provides useful quotations that you can utilize during the deployment of solutions.