Sanjay Castelino is the Vice President and Market Leader at IT management software provider SolarWinds. SolarWinds’ solutions address a broad range of IT management challenges related to networks, servers, applications, storage and virtualization.
The company has taken a bit of a different approach to the federal market. WashingtonExec recently spoke with Castelino and discussed the company’s business strategy as well as the trends he’s seeing.
WashingtonExec: You work with both the commercial and federal markets; what are the differences in serving the two?
Sanjay Castelino: Honestly, in terms of IT challenges, they are very similar. We survey our customers on a regular basis and usually dissect results to look at commercial and fed side by side. The answers in terms of the “keep you awake at night” problems are common across both sectors. Everyone is experiencing growing network complexity due to smarter devices, mobility, and an evolving security landscape.
WashingtonExec: Given the similarities, do you sell differently to the two sectors?
Sanjay Castelino: We have always aimed to be the value-leading option for all customers. We don’t have a traditional federal BD team, but we do have a dedicated federal sales, sales engineering and marketing team working with our government customers. In addition, our products have gone through many of the Federal security and procurement certifications processes and for the most part, are priced so that they can be purchased without a lot of red tape for government customers. In the federal space, our software tends to be purchased by one individual or department for their specific system or application. As they see success, they talk to their bosses and colleagues and show them what the product has done for them. Our customers become our evangelists and help move our solutions up the organization to bigger enterprise deployments.
“Now, especially in light of the PRISM scandal and FISMA requirements, InfoSec is rapidly adopting continuous monitoring to help achieve their goal of protecting the same IT infrastructure from intrusions and other exploitations. It makes sense to look at combining some of these monitoring functions and adopting continuous monitoring tools that can provide value to both groups at the same time.”
WashingtonExec: What is the most interesting trend you are seeing?
Sanjay Castelino: I would say the most interesting trend right now is the growing collaboration between IT operations and security teams. These two groups have traditionally held different priorities – ops needs the IT infrastructure and applications to keep working and InfoSec needs the systems to be secure. The reality however, is that much of the data that is gathered by the ops team is relevant to the InfoSec team and vice versa. Ops tools can be a key part of a continuous monitoring strategy for the InfoSec teams and we’re starting to see conversation around that.
WashingtonExec: So what does that mean for how they do their jobs?
Sanjay Castelino: Especially in the federal IT space, people are looking for cost efficiencies now more than ever. One place where we are seeing a lot of interest is in continuous monitoring. IT operations teams have adopted continuous monitoring for years to identify problems and to “keep the lights on.” Now, especially in light of the PRISM scandal and FISMA requirements, InfoSec is rapidly adopting continuous monitoring to help achieve their goal of protecting the same IT infrastructure from intrusions and other exploitations. It makes sense to look at combining some of these monitoring functions and adopting continuous monitoring tools that can provide value to both groups at the same time. It’s all about dual use. Dual-use tools that benefit both priorities will win advocates from the bottom of the organization up, as employees use the things that make them more productive. When continuous monitoring is built into your solutions – and when those solutions are easy to use and make everyone’s job easier – security and performance are not conflicting goals.
