Interview with Ivanti’s Samer Hani

We wanted to know what Ivanti is doing to bridge the gap between traditional and digital learning settings as part of our continued coverage of the ongoing wave of digital transformation. We posed four questions to Samer Hani, Middle East Regional Director of Ivanti. More information on digital transformation, Ivanti neurons, the channel partner ecosystem, and the acquisition of RiskSense may be found below.

TECHx: In today’s market, how do you see business continuity being redefined? How is Ivanti supporting businesses in bridging the technical divide as the  digital transformation tsunami continues ?

Samer: Living in an interconnected world, working in different times zones, cultures and markets with different standards, and things moving fast, being adaptable is crucial. The pandemic accelerated change with benefits like smart working and digitalization. Employees are spread across the world accessing apps and data from different devices, whenever and wherever they work. Ivanti is creating end-to-end solutions supporting this new “everywhere workplace”, delivering secure and personalized employee experiences across industries for people to thrive.

According to our recent survey, 63% would rather work remotely than be promoted, 48% would take pay cuts in exchange and 12% want to return to an office full time. Meaning, the “everywhere workplace” will stay and IT faces challenges, solving technical and security issues from employees in diverse situations across various endpoint devices, with limited direct access. Remote working eliminated walkup IT requests but challenged organizations without robust request/fulfillment processes and access to resources for self-service. Our platform enables companies to discover, manage, secure and service endpoints and IT assets, making the “everywhere workplace” possible. It finds and protects devices, provides IT support, and creates working environments supporting employees. For IT or line-of-business teams, we are leading in service management solutions, Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) and security. We resolve incidents pre-emptively, optimize values of IT assets, and enable employees to self-serve with our hyper-automation platform. Businesses reduce outages by up to 70%, resolve up to 80% of issues before being reported and improve the change success rate by 95%.

To bridge technical divides as the digital transformation continues, we apply the “shift left” strategy, a practice intended to find and prevent software defects. Our platform combines the latest technology and enables us to secure and service laptops, desktops, tablets, mobiles, and servers across operating systems. IT departments can then focus on strategic initiatives and deliver services faster. Our platform bridges technical divides, reducing costs, eliminating more than 50% of IT housekeeping tasks, and connecting business departments, IT operations, security, and senior executives. We also provide 100% visibility on IT management tasks related to organizational backend operations. Executive teams get insights regarding costs and availability of services, while securing their environment against cyber-attacks and ransomware activities that harm an organizations’ reputation or business.

TECHx: Ivanti Neurons was launched last year with the aim of enabling businesses to self-heal and self-secure their devices. How has the platform evolved over a period of a year, and how is it currently supporting customers?

Samer: Ivanti Neurons is a hyper-automation platform meeting organizations’ exponentially growing IT and business requirements. It provides self-healing, self-securing and self-servicing solutions, improving costs, speed and IT service accuracy. Automation-powered bots “shift-left” your IT incidents, detecting issues and actioning. We service endpoints from the network to the edge. Think of Ivanti Neurons as an IT co-pilot, augmenting IT with non-disruptive resolutions, transforming employees’ experiences. It enhances systems companies already have, pulling accurate data across Ivanti and third-party systems for IT teams to discover, manage, secure and service from a single platform. With an easy set-up, organizations have lower administrative costs and better time-to-value.

The Ivanti Neurons hyper-automation platform was released at the right moment and grew rapidly due to our cloud architecture. Our product allowed us, with the help of our growing customer base, to receive the Most Innovative AI Solution award during the 2021 Computing AI & ML Excellence Awards. Ivanti Neurons is about AI and AML, combining old and new automation technologies to anticipate, solve, secure and manage platforms proactively without affecting the end user-experience. This was essential to customers during the pandemic, as it helped IT departments discover, heal and service IT assets from anywhere. Ivanti Neurons includes IT customization for changing requirements without involving outside consultants, freeing up senior IT staff to focus on value-adding activities and simplifying vendor agreements, saving costs and extending IT capabilities.

In the past year, we expanded the capability of Ivanti Neurons, allowing companies to use accurate, real-time data to act and reduce their time to patch, helped optimize applications with comprehensive pictures of asset portfolios and extended offerings to HR and Facilities.

TECHx: In the face of a shifting business landscape, how do you empower your channel partners?

Samer: Our partners are our focus and we recently updated our channel program, adding several benefits for them. Our partners are different than other vendor partners as our business is about helping and empowering IT departments to work better and achieve immediate results. Our combined approach translates into consultative methods, eliminating client challenges and achieving the best possible outcomes.

TECHx: Please elaborate on your recent acquisition of RiskSense. What precisely is the significance of this acquisition?

Samer: Ivanti is leading in patch management and this acquisition takes capabilities to an even higher level. The combination of Ivanti and RiskSense enables organizations to shrink their attack surface, prioritize vulnerabilities, remediating and reducing exposure to cyber threats and ransomware attacks, taking proactive, risk-based approaches to patch management.

With RiskSense things run smoother. We focus on security, and we will never stop being creative and innovative when delivering solutions. We integrated the RiskSense Vulnerability Intelligence and Vulnerability Risk Rating, prioritizing, and quantifying adversarial risks based on threat intelligence, in-the-wild exploit trends and security analyst validation, into Ivanti Neurons.

“Over the past two years, cyberattacks such as ransomware have crossed the line from being a nuisance to truly disrupting society” (Srinivas Mukkamala, CEO of RiskSense) and organizations are encouraged, also in a recent White House memo, to use risk-based assessment strategies to drive patch management and bolster cybersecurity. Gartner listed risk-based vulnerability management as a top security focus for 2021 to drive business value and reduce risk.