Channel Chief
“We will introduce security appliances”
 With competition in the antivirus software market heating up, Abhijit Jorvekar, VP, Sales and Marketing, Quick Heal, spoke about his company’s competitive strategy in an interview with Tabrez Khan
What’s the size of the Indian antivirus software market? What’s Quick Heal’s current market share?
According to our estimates, the market for antivirus software in India is worth between Rs 325 crore and Rs 350 crore. In revenue terms, Quick Heal has a share of around 30 percent. We have been growing at a CAGR of almost 80 percent over the last four years. In the Q3 FY2009-10, we crossed a turnover of Rs 100 crore.
With increasing competition from the likes of Kaspersky, Eset and Nod32, what will your strategy be?
One of our strategies is to have multiple products at various price points targeted at various users. Our Guardian brand targets price-conscious users, while products under the Quick Heal brand are targeted at commercial users.
Logistics is also a key strength of Quick Heal. All our desktop products are available ex-stock at most locations, and even enterprise products are available either off the shelf or within 24 hours. We have strengthened the availability of our products in the south, where we had a slightly weak presence as reported by your magazine earlier this year. We have appointed Inspan as a regional distributor for the four southern states.
We are also focused on our training programs, which are free and conducted practically every week at all the branch locations. They are even available on demand. We are further strengthening our support infrastructure, and have doubled the strength of our call center from 30 seats to 60. With this, our support is now available 24/7 instead of the earlier 18 hours a day.
What measures will you be taking to increase your presence in the commercial segment?
We have started building a sales team specifically for this segment. Although the team is currently small, we plan to have dedicated personnel targeting the commercial segment across all class A cities. This team will cover named accounts across all metros, and rope in SIs and VARs for the business. We have also been adding new products to cater to this segment. Some of the products we have launched in the recent past are protection for Windows Mail Server, Microsoft Exchange and various mail servers on Linux. We have recently introduced a more robust version of our popular product, Admin Console.
SMBs and enterprises often deploy MNC products to have a ‘hassle-free’ experience. How do you plan to succeed in the segment?
There does exist a mindset which prefers products from the traditional players in enterprise security, hence we have followed a bottom-to-top strategy for the segment. Some of our products are already popular in the emerging enterprise/SMB segment, and the performance of our products together with our strong commitment to post-sales support have started creating inroads for us in some of the larger organizations. SIs who have a strong say in the buying of security products have also been playing a role in the same because they are more comfortable with our partnering than the buyer-seller approach of other vendors.
How many commercial licenses have you sold so far, especially to the government and education segments?
We have more than two million active users out of which 10 percent are in the commercial segment and 15 percent in the government and education segments. In our estimate, the opportunity for antivirus software in the government segment is worth at least Rs 25 crore per year. In the education segment one is witnessing rapid growth, with suppliers bagging average contracts of 1,500-2,000 nodes from a single educational institution. The proliferation of computers and the spread of the Internet across educational institutions have created demand for antivirus software in the education segment.
Are you planning to get into other areas of the security domain?
We are keen on introducing security appliances to our portfolio. Quick Heal will play on its strengths in the appliance segment. We have a strong presence in the SOHO and SMB segments, and we will launch appliances targeted at these segments.
Are you considering any new business models such as SaaS? What are your plans for the channels?
SaaS is one of the new business models we are keen on exploring. We have a platform available for ISPs, and there is already one ISP from Delhi who is using it to provide Quick Heal subscriptions to its customers. Besides this, we plan to introduce cloud-based filtering services.
On the channel front, we are keen on recruiting partners with an SI background as they have a good understanding of the customers’ IT requirements and can suggest the right solution based on the customers’ in-house IT capabilities. Our target will be existing SIs in the networking and server deployment space who are looking to get into the security business. We plan to recruit 50-60 of them initially. We aim to recruit at least two such partners in class A cities, and one partner in class B cities. |