Antivirus
Quick Heal ahead of the pack
For the second consecutive year, Quick Heal maintained its channel leadership in antivirus. While Kaspersky polled more unique votes compared to Symantec (Norton), its lack of a channel framework, over-distribution, pricing disparities, and lack of centralized post-sales support put it at the bottom of the table. With its very competitive pricing, Kaspersky has gained substantial market share over the last 12 months.
Other vendors such as eScan, K7 and McAfee failed to make the final cut because they polled less than 10 percent of the overall unique votes received.
eScan, which ranked number three in 2008, saw its channel mindshare dwindle in 2009, and many respondents said that eScan lacked channel focus.
McAfee, which announced aggressive plans for consumer antivirus in 2008, failed to execute its plans in 2009.
K7, which signed on Compuage Infocomm as national distributor, has failed to achieve channel penetration, and largely remains a south-focused brand. It polled most votes from south, and a few from west.
Product availability
Quick Heal’s regional distribution model and wide network of offices has given it strong market penetration. However, the company lacks channel penetration in the south, where it polled negligible votes.
Symantec has improved its distribution coverage, but it’s still not as penetrative as Quick Heal in smaller cities due to lack of a strong network of sub-distributors. In October 2009, the company announced that it would increase its sub-distributor network from 10 to 100.
In 2008, Kaspersky lacked distribution coverage in the north and east while it did well in the west and south. In 2009 the company changed its distribution model from national to regional, but this did little to help. While it achieved penetration in the east, it lost channel share in the west. In the north, the company hasn’t been able to make much headway.
Price-performance
While Norton is perceived to be a superior product on performance, Quick Heal ranked higher on price-performance owing to its competitive pricing.
Kaspersky is the lowest-priced product; its 3-user Internet security pack is available at a market operating price (MOP) of Rs 550. Misuse of the 3-user pack saw the vendor launch a single-user pack at an MOP of Rs 450, but it was unavailable for most of the year. Over-distribution of the product led to pricing disparities, and as a result Kaspersky was ranked third.
Symantec reduced prices by 20 percent in October 2009, and launched a new brand called PC Tools to take on low-priced players.
Partner profitability
Quick Heal offers the best profitability. According to respondents, Quick Heal offers much better margins and renewal commissions than its peers.
Symantec leaves very little on the table as the difference between its MOP and MRP is the lowest, and its commission on renewals is less. Kaspersky has the highest gap between MOP and MRP; this leads to many opportunistic resellers hawking it at a lower price thus affecting the margin realization of serious players.
Marketing and training
Quick Heal is the most aggressive with customer and channel marketing. In class A cities, Norton has the strongest brand-pull. However, respondents say that Quick Heal too is becoming a pull-brand with its aggressive consumer advertising.
Partners reported Quick Heal as being the most forceful on the channel schemes and training front. Symantec’s channel marketing has improved after its channel expansion. Kaspersky’s channel is totally managed by its RDs, and there’s little effort to offer any meaningful channel schemes or training programs. Its total lack of customer marketing has led to low brand-awareness among customers.
Post-sales support
Quick Heal’s USP is its post-sales support. Partners rate it highly because it provides physical support for installation in smaller cities, and has local engineers available in a number of places. In the case of other brands, partners may have to send their own engineers onsite for the installation, which is an additional cost for them.
While Norton’s online support is good, its tele-support needs to improve. It has no ground support, which many respondents in small cities said is essential.
Kaspersky’s support is managed by its distributors. An issue reported by some respondents is that often, even after registering, customers fail to get the activation code e-mail. The regional distributors have no expertise in managing such issues and hence they escalate it to the international office, which is time consuming. As a result many customers return the product. The company has recently appointed some partners for post-sales support, which respondents believe is a good step as it will help address installation issues.
Channel policy and management
Quick Heal scores over its peers on this parameter. Regular interactions with partners at the local level and flexibility in providing them support have strengthened its channel relationships.
Till last year Symantec suffered due to its lack of focus on small cities. However, after it appointed a number of regional distributors in Q4 2009, its channel engagement has improved.
Partners said Kaspersky needs to have a local presence in India if it wants to succeed in the long term. Presently its channel engagement is driven entirely by RDs in an ad hoc fashion, without consulting partners.
<< back to the List
|