SolarWinds doubles down on APAC business

SolarWinds is doubling down on its business in Asia-Pacific and teaming up with some of the region’s largest systems integrators to expand its footprint in the market.

It recently announced an artificial intelligence-based offering with India’s HCL to provide 5G mobile network operators with observability capabilities, building on their partnership to improve IT operations for enterprises.

The company is also planning to bolster its service desk product with HCL’s Lucy chatbot and is working with Wipro and Infosys as well to develop joint offerings, leveraging the expertise of its partner ecosystem to stake a bigger claim on the region’s observability market.

Speaking to Computer Weekly on a recent visit to Singapore, Rohini Kasturi, chief product officer and executive vice-president of SolarWinds, said APAC is a strategic market with “significant growth” in many parts of the region, including China, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan.

“We see strong opportunity with system integrators, not just in launching products to this region, but also go-to-market investments,” he said, adding that this includes language localisation and delivering SolarWinds’ software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to markets such as Australia.

SolarWind’s recent moves come at a time when it is transitioning into a full-stack observability software supplier, going beyond its stronghold of providing infrastructure monitoring capabilities to ultimately enable autonomous IT operations for enterprises.

In painting SolarWinds’ technology vision, Kasturi noted that customers could, in time to come, be able to set business metrics, such as service levels, and let the SolarWinds platform monitor, observe and maintain the performance of IT services against those metrics.

While IT and business leaders would welcome observability and autonomous capabilities, Kasturi said IT professionals such as network administrators and security teams can also leverage SolarWinds for specific use cases: “We are building a platform story, but we're also making it flexible for various personas.”

Across Asia-Pacific, IT professionals, DevOps developers and senior IT leaders make up most of SolarWinds’ customers, Kasturi said, noting that IT pros, in particular, are resonating with hybrid cloud observability while developers and partners in the Philippines and Indonesia are embracing cloud and growing in numbers.

Asked about how SolarWinds plans to gain more mindshare among senior IT executives, given that the company is better known among IT professionals, Kasturi pointed to SolarWinds’ platform strategy.

“We’re able to elevate the conversation with customers like directors of IT who want to hear how we’re bringing value,” he said. “The systems integrators that we’re leveraging like Infosys and HCL are also opening up a lot of doors because they're now talking about a platform and getting a lot of [C-suite] meetings.”

Kasturi said SolarWinds’ platform strategy not only helps the company to compete better against “new age” rivals such as Splunk, New Relic and Datadog, as well as traditional players CA, BMC and Micro Focus, in different segments of its portfolio, but also extends its reach into larger enterprises through simpler licensing terms.

“The challenge historically has been licensing – network performance monitoring had one type of licensing while our APM [application performance monitoring] portfolio had different types of licensing. So, what we did was to streamline all that licensing into a node-based license, for a network node, server node or virtual machine.

“We’ve made it flexible, and we can support hundreds and thousands of nodes in a centralised deployment with a single install. That's how we're reaching enterprises,” he added.