With an aim to provide seamless security for its customers, Cyberoam is continuously innovating its product and solution offerings in order to create winning propositions for its customers.
Sunil Sharma, VP of Sales & Operations, SAARC, Cyberoam speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the company’s key focus and growth expectations from the market.
What are your key focus areas while targeting Indian SMB market for security solutions?
Proactive SMBs are making ambitious moves to innovate, differentiate and optimize their business, turning early adopters of emerging IT technologies. This results in the increased demand for security for BYOD environments, virtualization, cloud etc. IT vendors are already eager to tap into SMB space, security business is obvious to follow.
Although SMBs are improving their outlook on IT and tech spend, there are few things that remain peculiar with SMBs. Whether it is network security or any other IT offering, SMBs demand flexibility, manageability, ease of use and maintenance, better RoI / lower TCO and a technology partner that understand their needs.
At Cyberoam, we take special care to develop security that ensures seamless connectivity thereby increasing the productivity for the organizations.
What verticals are you targeting for your solutions in the SMB security space?
We are eying organizations in Education, Retail, E-commerce, Healthcare, IT, Manufacturing, BFSI and Government & Defense.
How big would be the market for security solutions in SMB? and what is your market share in this market segment?
Indian IT security market is poised to be USD 500M plus market. Growing at more than 16% per annum, it is experiencing continued progress and emergence of new segments within security, including network, endpoint, cloud, BYOD & virtualization.
Cyberoam is leading in the network security space in the SME / SMB market. SMEs / SMBs contribute to 60 % to our total revenues. And we are looking at strengthening our position in tier 2 and 3 cities as well.
What kind of product innovations is your organization putting forward in this area of SMB security solutions?
Cyberoam brings one of the best and most comprehensive portfolio of security solutions for SMBs.
We were the first network security vendor to launch fastest security appliances for SOHO and SMBs.
And recently, with the launch of 10iNG, which has received rave reviews from customers and partners alike, we successfully brought the fastest and most affordable UTM for small and branch offices. We understand that while small businesses don’t have the luxury of resources and IT expertise, such limitations should not limit their potential. To address such concerns, we bring enterprise-class security features on SMB appliances. Moreover, they are underpinned by the same CyberoamOS that power our high-end enterprise appliances and hence bring reliable security, productivity and performance benefits.
There are many ‘firsts’ that we have launched in the recent past like FleXi Ports, in-depth on-appliance reports, NG Series appliances offering fastest security to SOHO/SMB segments, et al that are purely based on the needs of our customers and give us an edge over competition.
Cyberoam provides compelling next-gen security features to SMBs, which includes high-performance EAL4+ certified firewall, plug-and-play IPS, VPN, industry-leading application control and visibility and exhaustive web content filtering.
In addition, with on-appliance logging and reporting and Web Application Firewall capabilities, we help SMBs make better investments and consolidate security over a single appliance. Cyberoam’s layer-8 user-identity based security remains a cutting-edge capability that defend SMBs against insider threat and provide dramatic improvements in driving employee productivity. We also keep security management simple by making SMB appliances centrally manageable. This adds immense value to SMEs having distributed branch offices.
What role is being played by the channel community in this segment?
Our channel has been successfully driving this business and they are completely aligned to our goals and vision. Our resellers have become end-to-end solution providers for this segment of customers. Moreover Cyberoam invests great enthusiasm in its channel partners’ community and enables them with a wide range of support and skills. From FREE training and certifications to a slew of reward and rebate programs through our Partner Program, Cyberoam leaves no stone unturned to empower and motivate its partners.
In addition, our partners also get access to rich online tools like Virtual Cyberoam Central Console and Cyberoam’s On-Cloud Management Service, which remains totally FREE of charge! Cyberoam Partner Portal is a unique online infrastructure that provides on-demand and anytime access to customer management, appliance management and business management resources to our partners, backed with presales and 24*7 support assistance.We are proud of our partner initiatives and have created a highly empowered partner base in the industry.
What kind of growth opportunity are you targeting from this segment?
It is estimated that the India SMBs are going to spend $15bn on IT which is 1/3rd of the overall IT Spend in India. And we aim to dig deep into this segment.
Secondly, Indian SMBs need to be counseled on the kind of security risks technologies can pose and that deploying a world class cost-effective solution can help increase their business productivity. And the vendor who is able to do that will walk away with a major chunk of revenue from them.
We are also enabling new opportunities for our channel partners while expanding our ecosystem with extensive offerings, product line and cutting edge expertise. With an unmatched heritage of bringing many industry-firsts and end-to-end solutions make us not only one step ahead but truly one-stop-shop partner in network security for SMBs.
