"Our aim is not to aggressively select partners, but to aggressively tap opportunities with our selected partners"

Chung Foo Chaw is betting big on India for Internet Security Systems' (ISS)
business and expects it to overtake China, in terms of business generated,
within two years. He feels security will account for more than 3% of IT budgets
of corporates. For this to happen, ISS will invest heavily towards creating
awareness, as well as set up an R&D center in the country.

ISS has been in the country for over five years now. So why is it that the
company has decided to go aggressive in its business now, by opening its own
office and recruiting people?

For ISS India, this is a very critical stage in its business. The reason
behind our expansion here is driven by the fact that many of our global
customers are setting their operations in the Indian sub-continent. Also, we are
looking at setting up an R&D base in the country, which would be the first
non-US R&D center for ISS. Then will launch our Proventia range of products,
which will gradually become our flagship product.

So keeping all these aspects in mind, we needed to move into an office of our
own as well as get more people on board, which would further be supplemented
with our investments on partner training and marketing.

From your company perspective, where would you place the Indian market in
APac region?

Currently in terms of business contribution, Japan is #1 followed by China
and then India. But we believe in next two-three years, India will not only
overtake China, it would also carry out very significant R&D activities. We
have earmarked $5-10 million for investing in India in the next three years.

In terms of people, we are looking at having between 40 to 50 people in the
R&D team. So clearly, the Indian market is a very strategic one and will
play an extremely important role in ISS' global growth.

What is so different about ISS' solutions as compared to its
competition?

Most security companies work at improving their technology or enhancing
their R&D work. But the area where they miss out is adding intelligence to
solutions. ISS, right from its inception, has integrated intelligence into its
solutions.

So while the product development team keeps working on newer technologies and
products, there's a separate division altogether called X-Force, which works
on bringing enhanced intelligence to our solutions. The X-Force researches
dedicatedly on vulnerabilities and threats-much ahead of the time that they
can really impact.

In fact, a Frost and Sullivan report attributes 56% of all the security
advisories to ISS over the last five years. This shows, how ISS has always been
ahead of threats and providing timely solution for the same.

ISS also manages a security consortium called IT-ISAC (IT Information Sharing
and Analysis Center), which helps it to get first-hand information about
vulnerabilities even before many other security vendors.

Also, we offer integrated security solutions and not stand-alone firewalls or
intrusion detection or URL filtering. Hence, the total cost of ownership of our
solutions turns out to be reasonably less than those offered by our competition.

Additionally, we have a unified patch management for various components in
our security appliance (Proventia M series), which minimizes the hassle to have
different patches for every security component.

What would be your channel strategy for the country?

We have a two-tier channel model in India. On one hand we have premier
partners-Wipro Infotech, HCL Comnet and Ramco Systems-who have direct access
to ISS and service large clients. In order to cater to the remaining channel
community, we have two distributors-Select Technologies and Ingram Micro.
These two companies will engage their channel partners to further sell ISS
solutions.

We are also in the process of identifying aggressive regional players who
have a strong focus on security to address many verticals for whom security is
very critical to their business. However, we would be very selective in choosing
these partners. Our aim is not to aggressively select partners but to
aggressively tap the opportunities with our selected partners.

What kind of growth is ISS looking at from its Indian business?

We are looking at a growth rate of about 100%. In other countries like
Singapore and Japan, security comprises of about 3% to 5% of corporate's
overall IT budget. In India, this figure is quite low at around 1% or so.

We aim to increase awareness among the end-users on the need to invest in
reliable security solutions. Once this budget allocation for security increases,
our growth will automatically follow.

What is that one significant message that ISS would like
to give to partners who maybe looking at selling ISS solutions?

To put briefly, I would like to tell partners that Proventia, the unified
security solution offered by ISS, is a revolutionary product, which leaves
competition far behind. Further, we believe in growing our partners together,
not just in good times but also in bad ones. We are here to make money but only
after ensuring that our partners make money too.

GOLDIE