Syntensia discontinues direct sales model, embraces channel instead

Mumbai: Sweden-based UTM manufacturer, Syntensia AB has decided to discontinue its direct sales model and will go only through the channel this year onwards.

The company has been offering its security on demand services with its UTM device in India since May 2006 directly to SMB customers, which is its target vertical. It took this decision because it felt that before engaging with the channel, it needed to create better awareness for its brand 'White Knight' and have a good installation base.

"Partners are more comfortable selling matured products which have better acceptance in the market. By going direct we could also create a good clientele and also got first hand feedback about the product," said Kaushik Thakkar, Vice Chairman and Co-Founder of Syntensia AB.

In fact, based on direct customer feedback Syntensia even made a couple of changes to its products. For instance, it had a smaller box earlier because it thought that Indian SMB would not have a lot of online traffic. But then it realized that these customers had huge traffic and gradually increased the size of the box and added more capabilities to it.

While it was selling direct, Syntensia started signing up channel partners and currently has around 15 active partners. Since late last year, it decided to discontinue its direct sales and focused on creating a pool of five regional distributors including Sterling Infoways, Vora Brothers, SafeNet, etc who will then work with resellers.

"Currently we are in talks with about 50 partners in east, west and north India, of which half have signed up and have started maintaining inventory," informed Thakkar.

He added that these partners will be trained and equipped to offer the company's managed services model. Here Syntensia customers can simply buy the UTM for a one time installation cost of Rs 20,000 and then pay a monthly fee of Rs 2,500 to avail of various security features like anti-virus, anti spam, content filtering, intrusion detection, firewall, VPN, etc.

"This model works similar to getting cable TV, where the satellite dish is at the cable operators and the subscribers simply pay for the channels they want to watch," he added.

The company is targeting SMBs with 25 plus users and will offer them 24x7 support, system configuration as well as free replacement if the box fails.

To support the incumbent partner network Syntensia has put in place a fulltime logistics team and has set up a warehouse on the outskirts of Mumbai. As yet the company has no plans of working with a big ticket national distributor, as most of these already sell their competing brands.

"But our regional distributors have strong ambition to grow nationally and in due course of time as the volume of business increases one of them can take a national role," Thakkar hoped.

Syntensia is also negotiating with telecom operators where the latter will bundle its solutions and service SMB customers. "We will also have a VoIP solution coming in our White Knight UTM boxes as well as online payment facilities," Thakkar said.

Currently the company's monthly sale is around 200 units in India. But it expects this to go up to 1,000 a month this fiscal with its decision to opt for a channel route.