Spotlight

SonicWALL looks beyond UTM

After acquiring a thousand Indian customers for its UTM solutions, SonicWALL is expanding its portfolio. Abhinav Singh reports

SonicWALL began its operations in India by selling through its distributors and setting up a liaison office at Bangalore in August 2005. Today it has about a thousand customers for its UTM solutions. Videocon, Jet Airways, ISRO, Hindware Sanitaryware, Sun TV and Anna University are some of the customers the company has acquired.

These customer acquisitions prove that SonicWALL has overcome the challenge of selling UTM solutions, something which was considered tough by the industry. With the concept of UTM growing in popularity, the company now aims to leverage its position in India which is one of the fastest-growing markets for SonicWALL in the region. It has also added Select Technologies as a new distributor in India.

Training and equipping partners

"We want to penetrate deeper into B&C-class cities through our partners, and want to have them well-trained and equipped so that they can reach customers effectively" -Shubhomoy Biswas Country Manager, India SonicWALL

By choosing Select, the company has doubled the number of its partners to 60 from the base of 30. Shubhomoy Biswas, Country Manager, India, SonicWALL says, “We want to penetrate deeper into B&C-class cities through these partners, and want to have them well-trained and equipped so that they can reach customers effectively. We feel that specialised and trained partners will be able to create more awareness about SonicWALL and the concept of UTM solutions, and also how much the concept can offer potential customers across India.” SonicWALL has plans for numerous incentive programmes to keep its channel partners motivated.

Replacement within 24 hours

The company is providing direct after-sales support to its customers in India, and has introduced the ‘Replacement back to manufacturing’ scheme in the country. Through this, a defect in the box is replaced within 24 hours anywhere in the country. The company has set up a warehouse in Mumbai which is equipped with all the models of SonicWALL products to be supplied at short notice. Products from the company’s manufacturing bases in China and the US continuously replenish the warehouse.

SonicWALL has leveraged the support of its call centre operations in India to deliver efficient after-sales service. It has outsourced its call centre operations to e4e Labs in Bangalore where it has more than 100 people providing support to its customers. Comments Biswas, “We consider our after-sales service as our USP, and have been able to attract more customers due to this.”

Global acquisitions fuel Indian growth

SonicWALL has acquired companies worldwide to add more technology practices to its kitty; it recently acquired Lasso Logic and enKoo in the US. The acquisition of Lasso Logic—an early-stage company that provides continuous data protection for backup and recovery solutions for the SMB—will allow SonicWALL to enter into the networked storage market. Lasso eliminates the need to purchase separate backup software, hardware, servers and storage products. EnKoo is expected to help the company’s entry into the SSL-VPN space, and will bring in the secure remote access technology for SMBs.

For branch offices

SonicWALL is bullish about the Indian SMB market. It has UTM solutions which can cater to the requirement of 10 users and can scale up to 1,000 users. The company wants to tap the SMB market in India through its SSL-VPN solutions.

According to Biswas, the SSL-VPN 2000, a new solution, can cater to 100 concurrent users and costs around Rs 2 lakh. Another product, the SSL-VPN 200, is aimed at 10 concurrent users and is priced at less than Rs 40,000. “Even SMBs are setting up branch offices across different cities and want their partners and dealers to be connected to their network in a secure manner. They are therefore expected to further drive SSL-VPN technology in India,” analyses Biswas.

The acquisition of Lasso Logic has helped the company enter the storage space, and it is expected to come out with content data protection products in India. These cut down the need for having tape drives for storage.

Biswas explains: “Lasso technology will help us address a major SMB concern with regard to shrinking data recovery time and reducing the cost of downtime following a physical disaster. The acquisition of Lasso brings to SonicWALL the technology necessary to complement its industry-leading networked data protection capability with excellent backup and recovery capabilities.”

SMB focus to stay

The main focus of the company will remain the SMB space and the branch offices of large enterprises. States Biswas, “Our focus will be on the SMB because there are limitations as to the number of users our products can support. This is because we can very well support the branch of a large enterprise but do not aim for the large centralised data centres of these enterprises. The mid- to smaller-level of enterprises are our targets.”

The company aims at making its solutions in the content filtering, gateway virus (all parts of the UTM solution) and SSL-VPN space more popular in India in times to come. Indeed, it is looking for 100 percent growth in 2006.

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com