Amit Singh, country manager, Dell SonicWALL, India, talks to Darnia Khongwir for ChannelTimes.com about its future market strategies and plans to stay on with its channel partners.
How does SonicWALL fit into Dell’s roadmap?
If you look at Dell’s acquisition for the past two years, it was mostly around the technology companies – to provide customers with the entire gamut of the IT industry products in the form of a solution and not as the point solution. So, if you go back multiple years and see what Dell has been doing was providing the point solutions in terms of desktops, servers and storage. For the last couple of years, Dell has been a complete solutions player by integrating all these things to provide complete solutions to our customers.
In terms of security, with the acquisition of SonicWALL, it completes our security portfolio also in the overall solution space. That is why it is a very important acquisition and it has been welcomed worldwide by the customers as well as channel partners.
In India particularly, it gives us a good amount of leverage because of Dell’s heavy presence in the country – be it sales or services. It gives SonicWALL the access and coverage to large enterprises and to the SME customers. All in all it is a great acquisition, welcomed very well by the end user as well as the partner community and we are quite excited about it.
Dell has a direct sales model while SonicWALL is primarily a channel player. What would be your go-to-market strategy moving forward?
In terms of the go-to-market strategy, we are still continuing with 100% Dell SonicWALL business being indirect. And the reason for that is the strength of SonicWALL, which we want to preserve and take advantage of. So the entire the Dell SonicWALL business is going through the channel partners only.
Currently, whatever direct leads we are getting from the direct teams we are engaging a partner there and going indirectly into markets. If it is identified by the direct team, it is being pursued by a partner only. The direct team is getting compensated for that so I don’t see any conflict in that respect.
SonicWALLhas made a mark mostly in the SME space. Moving forward do you see your growth coming mostly from this segment or do you also plan to tap the large enterprise space?
SonicWALL has always been very strong in the SME sector. Despite having a world-class enterprise product line, people first associate SonicWALL with SMEs. So it is a situation where our strength has become so overpowering that people do not associate us with our other side.
So there is a clear-cut goal in front of us – to communicate to the people about our enterprise strengths – about Dell SonicWALL product lines. We need to establish and clearly tell the enterprises in various countries and in India on the enterprise class products. And SME has always been our forte and we will want to continue on that.
What is the update on your R&D centre in Bangalore?
The R&D centre in Bangalore is a combination of tech support as well as R&D – the engineering team as well the tech support team. We do support for a series of Unified Threat Management (UTM) firewalls in SonicWALL till NSA E5500. We also provide both tech and engineering support for our SSL VPN product.
There has been an increase in the number of engineers here as well post acquisition. So, this clearly shows that after the acquisition, there were investments being made both in terms of the sales team and the engineering team worldwide. And you see investments coming in India. Plus you will see a couple more of investments coming in the next few months wherein we are ramping up our sales team also. We have increased it in the last quarter and we are going to increase it further in the next quarter as well. So you will see more head count in Dell SonicWALL.
With the acquisition comes the growth targets and we want to get our rightful share from the market. And for which we obviously need to make investment and right after the acquisition with Dell the investments are being made worldwide as well as in India. We are getting these approvals. Then, we can increase our team size to cater to the entire country and get a good share from the market.
So what does this translate to in the Indian context?
For large and medium enterprises, we want to leverage Dell’s strength where it has predominantly always been a strong player in the large and very large enterprise through its direct channel. We want to leverage their coverage as they have already established a foothold in the large enterprises as well as their accessibility to the managements there to take our story directly to them. So, without the acquisition, it would have taken SonicWALL a lot of time and energy to reach them. But now, with Dell acquisition, it is now quite straightforward. They just have to take our story to the customer base and make them more aware of our products and then we will see a lot of opportunity in the large enterprises here in India.
Focus-wise it will be our next generation firewalls and SSL VPNs are our products and email security to a large extent.
How do you see the security landscape changing in the days to come?
Security is something which everybody requires. It was needed a decade ago and it will still be needed 10 years from now. Only the kind of security has been changing because the kind of environment has also been changing. And why the environment has been changing is because:
• Innovation – every company and enterprise is doing a lot of innovation. They are bringing in new technologies, new applications to their network because they want to become more efficient. And with these innovations, security threats will come up automatically. For example, today your house one entrance door. You will need one lock to secure the entrance. But tomorrow you may want to innovate to allow three entrances to your house. This means you will need extra locks to secure your house. You can take a cue from there – because of these new innovations, new systems, new processors, new applications which are coming in an organisation, therefore it becomes imperative to change the security as well.
• Compliance – this has always been the bone of contention for many a CIO. It has also been a huge hindrance for security. Most of the organisation deal with some or the other form of data. There is a compliance which is applicable worldwide. There are country-specific compliance standards that organisations have to comply with in terms of how they secure that particular data. That is another reason why security is becoming a concern there. And organisations most often you will see overspend to meet compliance requirements and underspend in keeping up with the security requirements. So once I know I have to meet with the compliance requirements, then I would go and invest in security. But had they invested in the security first then the compliance too would have been kept in check.
• Attacks –The nature of the attacks have been changing with the times. Newer kinds of attacks have been taking place throughout the network. So keeping abreast with these kinds of things also is another trend that one sees in security. They are always making changes and developments as they are always more advanced than the previous version. And there millions of different specimen of spams also that are being created year and year.