By Ramdas S, CRN, January 4, 2011, 1100 hrs
Security vendor Fortinet is planning to revamp its distribution and enter the SMB market. Apart from creating new products at price-points that start at Rs 24,000, the vendor will appoint stockists, sub-distributors and one distributor.
Said Vishak Raman, Senior Regional Director, Fortinet India & Saarc, “We will continue with Ingram Micro which has been instrumental in connecting us with over 300 resellers, and has helped us become the No 1 in India. The entire business was back-to-back, but now for the newly introduced Fortinet 20C and 40C products we need another distributor.”
Till recently, Fortinet’s entry-level products were priced above Rs 75,000. “Till a few months back we never thought of a stock-and-sell because enterprise security market decisions always took time. However, stocking locally is necessary for the SMB market,” Raman said.
He said that UTM solutions are in demand from smaller cities, and that many of these places cannot be reached through a national distributor. “This makes it imperative that we have a second-tier distribution in place. We are now on the lookout for re-distribution partners.” Raman said that Fortinet is currently working with 300 partners, but plans to cover 5,000 partners with the new strategy. He informed that the stock-and-sell model would be only for 20C and 40C, while the other products would continue to be back-to-back.
Ruling out an immediate entry into the SOHO and home market, he said that their strategy to address this space would be to work with service providers to offer security services. “Our competition has started to work with the home segment. However, it makes more sense for a home user to buy UTM as a service at a price of, say, Rs 200 a month, rather than buy a box which would need configuration and support. We are in talks with a few telecom service providers, and are working on a few pilots.” |