Commenced in 1999, SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) provides powerful yet affordable IT management and monitoring software to small and international enterprises. The Austin, Texas based firm has a market cap of $3.06 billion.

Among the trends that are reshaping the industry, the Cloud surfaces as the most important. Cloud technology has made a serious impact in several areas of businesses, also traditional IT has been looking in leveraging cloud into a hybrid environment in mixing on-premises applications with parts of cloud and hosted environments. As enterprises across the globe are showing great interest in adapting to cloud, and cloud based applications, it is noteworthy that the IT industry is also taking the cloud to highly risk based environments. Another trend would be the consumerization of IT where people are integrating almost everything to their mobile device and this looks as a growing market.

Focusing on the applications involved in the network, the primary act should be in delivering those applications given its dependency in the industry. All these have contributed in serving a new consumer experience and the market as we see has now evolved in a fashion that was never predicted five years ago.

The Entrepreneurial Challenges

The typical challenge, according to me is to understand and follow the priorities. It is critical to maintain a relationship with the overall business, which should be applied to the different departments in the enterprise. It should be ensured that we are interacting and partnering with different departments, whether it is marketing or sales, or engineering to imply that I believe in them, thereby helping them to expand beyond their existing capabilities by bringing in new ideas and help them in prototyping those. With this being the biggest challenge, I spend considerable time with different departments in the company.

Towards Innovation

Innovation is a big part of a business. In view of the current rate of change, and technologies coming up, we need to find a balance between jumping on to the latest trend and keeping pace with the technology as we meet business goals. Promoting and combating innovation not only from top level but also bottom up, encouraging talented engineers to innovate should be top priorities. Adapting to a framework which tells that innovation can be evolved and be nurtured, understanding the fact that doing what is relevant to the business will not suffice, but it should be in a way which provides returns to your business and that is all what matters going forward.