"India is important when it comes to growth since it is a developing market", says Beatty of ALT-N Technologies

As part of its worldwide channel tour, ALT-N made a three-city visit to India in May to hold meetings with key channel partners and customers to gain feedback and share production direction. ALT-N's MDaemon Messaging Server is a trusted alternative to Microsoft Exchange or Small Business Server and has been sold in India for more than a decade. DQ Channels spoke to Kevin Beatty, VP, marketing and business development, ALT-N Technologies and the entire team of the company executives during their visit to India. Here are the excerpts

How is it going for ALT-N in India?

India has always been a very strong market for us. I think what we see is that with the different partners that we have and obviously with the cloud business we still see a lot of opportunities, and a lot of interest in our product. Even in the social media front, in the last two months, probably two thousand people have liked the Alt-N Facebook page from India.

What brings you to the country?

It is particularly meeting with our partners. Spaar has been our partner for seventeen years and it is very indicative of starting channel relationships. We were a small company when email was new in the SME market and we developed those relationships to build the product through word of mouth. And quite frankly, we probably should have come here soon but till now we have had typically our partners coming to us in Texas. It is important for us to go out and visit more partners and what we found is we are getting excellent feedback and obviously building the relationship stronger.

What kind of Indian market will ALT-N cater to?

Our products are typically used in the smaller and medium-sized businesses. The larger organizations tend to have different needs and ours is not really built for a large enterprise. The origins of our product have always been for small businesses that need affordability but also lot of features that they would get on an enterprise site. So as a small business like ourselves we try to keep that personal relationship, and keep it affordable. In some instances people think that as it does not cost much may be it does not have all the features that IT people typically start using it, they start talking to others. We have lots of people that have formally used Exchange for example on IT website and felt the good factor about it.

Can you tell us more about ALT-N products.

It is primarily M-Daemon Messaging server, besides our networking products. We also have a security gateway product and we are going to promote it more. This product really came out of what we found is we had lot of Exchange users who would put our messaging server in front of Exchange because of its effectiveness to clear out spam. So once we found that out we thought of making a product that actually is designed for that and so we took the core features out of M-Daemon from security standpoint and now we have a security gateway product that is used for in-bound and outbound filtering.

Phishing attacks is a very predominant problem when it comes to email security these days, with India being one of the most preferred destinations for phishers, as shown by surveys. How ALT-N is going to address the issue?

We were one of the first companies to take on that issue when we started working with lot of the associations ...one of the things that we did back in the US is we actually hosted a conference where companies like Yahoo, Google and others came to work on interoperability among servers using the DecayIM technology. We have always done that and this is one of the differentiators for us as a small company. We can be agile and work quickly and security is the focus for us. For companies that are targets for phishing we have things covered there and we are also working on the new D-Mark technology which is the next step from DecayIM.

What is thes D-Mark technology that you are working on?

D-Mark is an extension of Decay-IM and SPF. It is designed to make the validation of the other two easier. Basically it takes the hash and header of the message so that it can tell if it has been altered and it can validate about who actually send that message. Part of the problem they had before was that it was difficult for the administrator to figure out that why his messages are failing or not getting sent successfully. So D-Mark includes recording tools so that an administrator can collect that data and see if somebody is trying to use his domain to send messages that did not actually come from him. It is part of the email server. M-Daemon already does the signing of the messages and with D-Mark; there will be mechanisms for the servers to actually report out to other servers.

What products are you introducing in India?

ALT-N will introduce MDaemon Private Cloud email server software to enable SME service providers to offer email hosting to their customers. It builds on the flexibility and reliability to our on-premise product, the MDaemon Messaging server. In addition to this we will also be introducing new feature and pricing changes to SecurityGateway for Email Servers, which delivers inbound and outbound email protection based upon our nearly two decade expertise in email security. Our private cloud is for enabling service providers or re-sellers who want to maintain that relationship with their customers or provide more of a hosted solution with the product. We are introducing new features that are designed for that type of environment. We will have both the on-premise and the cloud space. But this is for providers who want to provide service to the end customers themselves.

What growth expectations you have from India?

60 percent of our market resides outside the US and Asia constitutes 16-17 percent of that chunk. So India is important when it comes to growth and it is a developing market unlike Europe where the market is saturated. We do expect to see more growth is from the email business users and infrastructure which continues to grow and evolve. What we really expect is working with our existing partners, and spreading greater awareness of our products, looking for new opportunities . What we see in the US in some of the areas that there is a lot of push of cloud and that has disrupted the channel relationship. But what differentiates us is that we want to keep partners ahead and work with them in order to grow in the market.

How has the advent of cloud computing changed your traditional partner-vendor relationship?

In some respect, yes, it does change where we have some coveted new partners who just typically talk of hosting and cloud service. But what we have seen with most of our partners is that it presents them with the opportunity to talk to customers that they typically have not been able to talk to because we look at our partners as an extension of us in a given country. We think that being able to have this cloud offering both give them and the new players opportunities who want to come in and maintain same relationship with their customers with some more flexibility.