Shubhomoy Biswas, Country Director, India & SAARC, SonicWALL

In a short interview with ‘InfoSecuirty’, Subhomoy Biswas, Country Director, India & SAARC, SonicWALL, unfolded their planning and thoughts for Indian market. We get a flavour of the same here…

Q. SonicWALL has its presence in key four security verticals (Network Security, SSL-VPN, Email security and Backup and Recovery). Which one has been so far gained maximum success in Indian market?

All the four security verticals have achieved equal success in their respective segments. SonicWALL's solutions are designed for ease of management and optimum security, so we are looking forward to another great year both in the enterprise, where we have recently expanded our offerings, and in the SMB space.

We launched UTM for enterprises last October—an appliance based on a 16-core CPU. This is the first of its kind. We have an SSL VPN for low-end—from 20 users and goes up to 200 concurrent users. By acquiring Aventail, we now have SSL VPN for enterprises—and can go up to over 5,000 users.

Q. What is the security solutions adoption momentum in Indian SMB market? How matured is Indian SMB market?

According to Biswas, "India is the most exciting market for security appliances. Our India business has been consistently growing at over 100 percent annually, and revenues from UTM appliances grew 300 percent last year.  As India’s economy grows, more businesses are using some kind of Internet capability, from online banking to VoIP to web-delivered service that requires Internet security solutions.”

Benefits have made UTM appliances hugely popular among small and medium businesses. "The exponential growth in the UTM market has been driven largely by SMBs. This segment has been increasingly investing in security solutions over the last two years and UTMs have emerged as an ideal choice due to lower total cost of ownership (TCO)," says Biswas.

"Without doubt SMBs have been the driving force in the adoption for UTM appliances. We have seen a lot of demand emerge from tier-2 and -3 cities. We have seen several large enterprises break up their networks; decentralizing them into small networks and deploying UTMs. Customers can recover their investment on security appliance in the first three months of deployment solely on savings on manpower and licensing cost," he says.

Q. What is your post sales service strength in India? Is it provided solely by SonicWALL or also through partners and System Integrators as well?

Our sale is totally channel driven. We will continue to work with partners who share our philosophy and commitment to our customers. They are trained and equipped to operate and win in a highly competitive and dynamic business environment.

India continues to be a strategic and critical market for SonicWALL. To support our local businesses and multinationals, we have to increase our investments. India is critically important to SonicWALL’s strategy and its long-term success.

SonicWALL is aggressively expanding its VAR network, increase its India employee headcount, and coming up with their new R&D facility in Bangalore. We will continue to invest in strengthening its VAR network and enhancing the teams’ capabilities to provide excellent sales and service support to customers. We are constantly innovating and devising new training programmes in line with the requirements of the current business eco-system. It is necessary that we work with partners who share our core values and are enthusiastic about our business like we are.

But coming to the issue of training VARs, we have a channel training and development program. Our VAR need not be an engineer…he can be a pure businessman. But we define the profile of people he needs to employ if he is to become our VAR. We also help VARs by training them how to run a sound business.

Q. What is SonicWALL's current 'Go-To-Market' strategy and how will it evolve in future?

Go-To-Market

The growth in India has been spectacular. India is the most exciting market for channel partners. Mr. Biswas claims that SonicWALL’s offers a great way for channel partners to increase their margins. "We offer double-digit margins to our partners on devices. The up-sell and cross-sell opportunities around the devices are far bigger. In our estimate, for every Rs 100 security appliance hardware sold, there is an opportunity to make an additional Rs 500 if partners sell smart."
                    
With the market exploding, vendors are sparing no effort to capitalize on the opportunity. Road shows for customer and channel awareness, increasing customer support infrastructure and channel expansion are on the cards for most vendors.

Our sale is totally channel driven. We will continue to work with partners who share our philosophy and commitment to our customers. They are trained and equipped to operate and win in a highly competitive and dynamic business environment.

India continues to be a strategic and critical market for SonicWALL. To support our local businesses and multinationals, we have to increase our investments. India is critically important to SonicWALL’s strategy and its long-term success.

SonicWALL is aggressively expanding its VAR network, increase its India employee headcount, and coming up with their new R&D facility in Bangalore. We will continue to invest in strengthening its VAR network and enhancing the teams’ capabilities to provide excellent sales and service support to customers. We are constantly innovating and devising new training programmes in line with the requirements of the current business eco-system. It is necessary that we work with partners who share our core values and are enthusiastic about our business like we are.

But coming to the issue of training VARs, we have a channel training and development program. Our VAR need not be an engineer… he can be a pure businessman. But we define the profile of people he needs to employ if he is to become our VAR. We also help VARs by training them how to run a sound business.

Q. What impact 'global management system capabilities' did bring into Indian market in terms of sales?

It has created a significant amount of impact in the Indian market. It allows IT administrators to manage thousands of remote SonicWALL security appliances and Unified Threat Management (UTM) services from a single, central location. Designed to scale with growing organizations, GMS eliminates the need for onsite support in distributed networks or branch offices.

Q. What additional value does SonicWALL bring with their solutions for SMB market and how capable are they in terms of future investment protection?

The exponential growth in the UTM market has been driven largely by SMBs. This segment has been increasingly investing in security solutions over the last two years and UTMs have emerged as an ideal choice due to lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

Without doubt SMBs have been the driving force in the adoption for UTM appliances. We have seen a lot of demand emerge from tier-2 and -3 cities. We have seen several large enterprises break up their networks; decentralizing them into small networks and deploying UTMs. Customers can recover their investment on security appliance in the first three months of deployment solely on savings on manpower and licensing cost.

Q. What is your product roadmap for Indian market for next year?

We have been growing for past three years at over three-digit percentage. India is also the fastest growing country for SonicWall. Market acceptance has been great.

In India, we are going at a breakneck speed. SonicWALL has over 2, 200 active customers for its product ranges starting from independent theft management and secure content management to back up and recovery.

The Internet is used by everybody. We have a lot of installations in factories, retails, airlines, banks, stock holding companies, telecom, and also in government, like railways. A lot of educational institutes, like IITs, also use our solutions.
The market is still growing in India very fast. More and more smaller companies are witnessing the usage of Internet in their business. Security has become de facto. Users want one box. So, the demand has been growing rapidly. In India, the UTM market is growing 30-35 percent year over year.

"In a challenging economic environment, SonicWALL demonstrated strong execution," said Shubhomoy Biswas. "The Company met revenue targets while making significant improvements in operating expense. In addition, SonicWALL continues to deliver industry-leading security solutions that are already winning accolades from industry critics."

Q. Is 'Managed Security Service' gaining momentum in India? How does SonicWALL look into this market?

Yes, 'Managed Security Service' is gaining momentum in India.

With IT infrastructures becoming more complex and the corresponding updated expertise needed to manage them not available organizations are increasingly finding it difficult to recruit, train and retain sufficient number of qualified personnel.

Increased complexity in LANs and WANs, growth of the Internet both in terms of reach and usage, reduced life cycle of products and a dearth of technical expertise are other factors that are driving the Indian enterprises to outsource.

Managed service providers (MSPs) given their IT infrastructure are in a position to pass on their expertise to the organization hiring their services in a cost effective way.

SonicWALL's has the MSSP programs which offer providers and VARs a solid platform for meeting the needs of their clients. Besides solid technology, SonicWALL also equips MSSPs with sales tools and collateral, training, account management support, co-branding, and joint programs.  MSSPs are able to establish strong customer relationships, and are able to enjoy the benefits of providing service with security tools from a market leader.

Q. Do you see any major behavioral change in Indian security market? If so, how much is SonicWALL prepared to meet the challenge?           

Some of the key growth areas observed, and which is likely to become stronger is the demand to go in for an integrated security appliance that performs a host of security functions, namely anti-virus, firewall, VPN, content filtering, IDS/IPS in addition to providing network monitoring tools.

With mobile computing catching on in a big way, more and more companies are looking at VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) for providing their employees remote access to their intranets. On the VPN front, there is a movement from the traditional client-based VPN to clientless VPNs.

SonicWALL SSL VPNs (Secured Socket Layer Virtual Private Networks) offer easy, effective solutions for the evolving remote access and remote support demands of today’s mobile workforce, including:

• Clientless Remote Access
• Clientless Remote Support w/ SonicWALL® Virtual Assist*
• Disaster Recovery
• Wireless
• Extranet Access
• Mobile Enterprise
• Enforcing Policy

We believe that there is a need for organizations to move on to intrusion prevention systems from intrusion detection systems. Explains Shubhomoy Biswas, Country Director, India & SAARC, “Threats to organizations come from a variety of sources, making it difficult to achieve adequate protection since one source of threat may bear no similarity to another. Intrusion prevention systems can provide diversity by identifying inappropriate activities occurring on networks and host systems.”