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'We continue to add more potential partners to expand our reach to new territories'

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Prasanth
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 In an interaction with DQ Channels, Mohit Puri, country manager, India & Saarc, WatchGuard elaborates upon company's channel strategy and product roadmap

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Describe briefly WatchGuard's business model.

WatchGuard is a 100% channel sales company. Our partners are our core, customer-facing sales team. We have over 15,000 partners across 120 countries.

We have a unique partner program called WatchGuard Secure Partner (WSP) program wherein we have three levels of partners WatchGuard Expert, Professional, and Associate Partner. For all the categories, partners are eligible for front -end discounts and quarterly back-end rebate in terms of their level, in addition to various other benefits that the WSP program offers.

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We have around 120 channel partners Pan-India working closely with us. For over 16 years, WatchGuard has been providing products, services and support to ensure a healthy security business for our WSP partners. It is our continuous endeavour to provide our partners best-in-class security solutions to serve their customers better and simultaneously ensure good margins.

What format of channel structure does the company have in place?

As mentioned, we have three categories of WatchGuard Secure Partnersâ??Expert, Professional and Associate, besides number of other partners. Total number of partners pan-India would be around 120, out of which 50+ are the WSPs.We have four distributors iValue Infosolutions, RAH Infotech, Cyberstar and RoundRobin Tech.

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How many RD/distribution and direct offices the company has and where are they located?

We have presence across India through our 120 partners and 4 distributors working closely with us. We have direct presence in Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Chennai.

How significant are the channel partners for the company's business growth in India? How many channel partners are there currently? Do you plan to increase your channel base in India by the end of this year?

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India is an important market for us. It is diverse with each region having its own market trends and preferences. What favors a particular section of the market may not be an option for the other. WatchGuard has been amongst major players in the Indian market. We are here for over a decade and have seen the UTM market evolving and going through various phases. During the course, we have added many new partners pan-India and we continue to add more potential partners to expand our reach to new territories. We are working closely with many big NSIs to tap opportunities in government and education verticals. Besides this, healthcare and retail will be in focus. Our focus for the past six months has been the B-and C- class cities where we see huge opportunity.

We have been growing our channel base for the last three years consistently as we do understand the importance of channel in our market. They are our extending arms. At present, we have around 120 channel partner pan-India and we hope to add another 30 to 40 channel partners by the end of this year.

What is the go-to-market strategy? What are the focus segments?

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India UTM market has been growing consistently and is looking poised to grow further at a faster pace. While we retain our leadership position in the SMB space, we are growing at a fast pace in mid-size market and also exploring in the enterprise segment with our new range of Extensible Threat Management (XTM) solutions which deliver high-end UTM performance with industry-leading technology to meet security needs of customers of any size with the highest level of protection in one speedy and scalable box.

In view of the emerging trends of BYOD and virtualization, we have launched new series XTMv & XCSv next-generation security appliance for virtual infrastructures and also recently launched Wireless Access Points AP 100 & AP 200 for WatchGuard XTM customers to secure their wireless environment.

Though on one side, we have aligned some good NSIs to tap opportunities in government vertical, we would be focusing on tier-2 cities where we see huge opportunity lying untapped.

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Which vertical in the Indian market contributes the most in the business growth? And, what are your further plans to enhance the business growth from these verticals which brings in a larger chunk of business?

Last year a big contribution was made by the BFSI sector as we have captured many cooperative banks in Western part of India .We also got few SCADA projects which are from the government vertical which has made a major contribution to our business. Besides this, education has always been one of the major contributors. This year we Health and Retail would also be in focus along with other verticals.

What was the recently launched channel program in India and how was it successful? Are you planning to come up with a new channel program in the coming months?

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We come up with number of channel programs every quarter. For this quarter we have lined up series of webinars direct from our experts on hosts of interesting topics for our channel partners. We have launched some very exciting schemes on our XTM, XCS and XTMv/XCSv series of appliances. Some of the schemes that have been quite successful in the past were Enjoy the Journey, Beat the Heat, March Dhamaka, Red Instead,, to name a few.

We have also scheduled our event at WatchGuard Channel Awards Nite this quarter that is the gala annual event dedicated to our channel partners who are the real contributors to WatchGuard success in India.

Describe the company's products driving the Indian market? What is the next product in store for the Indian market?

WatchGuard is the first company to bring out hardware based firewall in 1996 and later integrated all security services into single UTM device. To keep pace with the fast changing security landscape and to help businesses protect from ever evolving network security threats, WatchGuard R&D team has been continuously working hard and coming out with solutions providing robust security with ease of use and manageability yet at an affordable price point.

WatchGuard is moving security forward with its Extensible Threat Management (XTM) series of Next-Gen Network Security appliances, which is a new class of performance-driven security solutions with blazing fast throughput combined with advanced networking features to handle high volume traffic security.

WatchGuard XTM 2 & 3 series appliances are ideal for small businesses. XTM 330 is a no-compromise, ultimate firewall that is optimized for today's threat landscape. For midsize businesses, there could not be a better choice than the New XTM 5 Series which sports the fastest throughput in its price class without sacrificing security efficacy, manageability and ease of use. WatchGuard XTM 800 series, XTM 1050, XTM 2050 & XTM 2520 are ideal solution for mid to large enterprise. Enterprise class security with ease of use, manageability and visibility is what make our products popular across the globe and that's why organizations of all sizes rely on WatchGuard solutions for comprehensive network protection, peace of mind, and value.

Over the past decade or more, businesses of all sizes have leveraged virtualization to improve utilization and reduce costs. We have launched XTMv & XCSv next-generation security appliance for virtual infrastructures which delivers the same best-in-class, defense-in-depth protection offered by the WatchGuard XTM/XCS physical appliances.

We have also recently launched Wireless Access Points AP 100 & AP 200 for WatchGuard XTM customers to provide them safe and controlled connection of smart mobile devices on their network by extending Best-in-Class UTM security to WLAN.

There are many more exciting and innovative solutions in the roadmap that we will unveil during rest of the year.

What are the future plans for India?

WatchGuard India business has been growing consistently y-o-y and we expect to continue this legacy in the year 2013 also. We target to expand our reach to tier-2 cities and increase our channel base by 20-30%.

In view of the fast emerging trends, and with them the changing security landscape, we would be intensely focusing on bringing upgraded and latest versions of our security solutions to protect network, application, and data.

SMBs continue to gain more security awareness and as they do they often buy a UTM. This segment is still a strong area of growth for UTMs. Where we see additional growth is in the mid-sized enterprise. As vendors like WatchGuard continue to improve UTM throughput, larger companies can take advantage of a UTM without the performance concerns of the past.

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