Srinivas Mukkamala, Ivanti’s Chief Product Officer, provided a detailed layout of what is changing on the Ivanti product front and when it will be happening.
Dr. Srinivas Mukkamala, Ivanti’s Chief Product Officer
DALLAS – Last week, Ivanti kicked off their Ivanti Solutions Summit event here with CEO Jeff Abbott giving an overview of the company’s grand strategy with particular focus on what Ivanti is doing around the future of work. Dr. Srinivas Mukkamala, Ivanti’s Chief Product Officer, gave the next major address. Mukkamala discussed the work his team is doing to shape the future of IT and security, and how organizations can break down barriers for CIOs and CISOs so everywhere work can thrive now and into the future.
Mukkamala joined Ivanti in the RiskSense acquisition in August 2021, where he had been the CEO. He then took over in April 2022 as head of the Ivanti Security Business Unit, responsible for all security products. Then in September 2022, he took charge of the Chief Product Officer role.
“The key here is understanding the focus areas, where we spend our time,” he said. It really took about three months, until 2023 January, to really understand the process of SaaS transformation. We have different KPIs and different telemetry, and we have to harmonize that stuff. We had already begun to start to talk about it. Now you will see how we will handle the big wave on attack services and how do we bring all that together.”
This is all taking place within the confirmation of work. While today is seeing significant increase in employee flexibility, it comes at the cost of disruption from the need for new technology, IT burnout and security risks.
A major response by Ivanti has been the simplification of their solutions portfolio.
“We had been aggressively buying companies, and we started an innovation challenge last year,” Mukkamala said. “This year we further narrowed down the scope, doubling down on how we offer our patch information management. The patch became prioritized remediation.”
Another prioritization is the significant reduction in the solutions being offered.
“The focus on data that we have and are collecting has been simplified from 72 products to five,” Mukkamala indicated. We end-of-lifed over 30. Now we can go to customers and focus on their specific problem statements rather than on the products that we have to offer.”
Those areas are Enterprise Service Management Solutions Packages, Secure Unified Endpoint Management [SUEM] Solutions Packages, Zero Trust Network Access Solutions Packages, Cyber Asset Attack Service Management, which was launched at ISS, and Vulnerability Asset Management and Response, which is coming soon.
In 2024, Ivanti is choosing to focus on four specific areas, all of which are extrapolations of things they concentrated on in 2023.
In 2023, those areas were: SaaS transformation; core services; CPO Organization; and Data Drive. In 2024, SaaS transformation has become driving consistent telemetry and adoption metrics across products and measure.
“We have to be in the cloud,” Mukkamala stated. “We still have a lot of on-prem but we need to migrate people to the cloud.”
The Core Services now include Deliver OIL, Seamless UX, App Switcher, and OneNAV.
“The Core Services capabilities foundation is we stick to those core solutions, and bring a lot of information using bots and AI,” Mukkamala said. “That’s a big push this year, making sure that Core Services double down on our five solutions. Before we had customers do that.”
It’s also all much easier than before.
“Integrations were hard, but now we have functionality,” Mukkamala noted. “With ITSM UX modernization, we have come a long way, assisted by bringing in strong IT leader.”
App Switcher also makes it much easier to switch products more easily.
“Now with the ability to use only one app, it’s all very simple, and makes it easy to pick interesting use cases,” Mukkamala said.
CPO organization has been expanded to include WSM, SUEM, CAASM, vulnerability Response & Zero Trust Network Access
“We are launching CAASM this year, which lets you easily switch between the five solutions,” Mukkamala stated.
Data-driven changes deliver metrics, provide insight and make changes based on data.
“Data harmonization was where Adobe started, but where Microsoft and others have not fully achieved,” Mukkamala said. “CA failed completely and HPE is not close to what they want. While some players have a platform play, we are aspirational as well, so now have a full platform built for IT and Security.
“We have been very thoughtful embarking on our AI journey, with a focus on AI customers,” Mukkamala said. “There is functional working AI there, and the key ii harmonizing it across all customers. We don’t do anything without a design partner picked. You want to automate a playbook where you take leaked credentials and determine what you can do, such as get credentials and validate them to see if you can get into any other things. That’s more partnership, around validation.”
At ISS, Ivanti launched Ivanti Neurons for EASM, which enabled customers to identify and reduce their attack surface.
“It is pretty broad and covers a range of devices,” Mukkamala indicated. New solutions are also coming for CAASM and Vulnerability Management and Response.
