By Varun Aggarwal
Although a late entrant in the Indian market, UTM appliance vendor Astaro believes that it has a strong chance of becoming the number two player in the Indian UTM market over the next one year.
A European company, Astaro set up its India presence at the beginning of the year and is already ramping up its go-to-market strategy, which is completely partner led. “Over the past quarter, we have signed up with 12 strong partners in the North and have also signed up RAH as our distributor. Our aim is now to sign up partners in other regions. Next quarter we will be opening our branch in Mumbai and Chennai. We plan to enroll 25 partners each in the three key regions by end of the year,” informed Jan Hichert, CEO, Astaro.
Simultaneously, the security vendor is rolling out its training and certification programs to get the enrolled partners certified on its technology. “Our aim is to get partners with strong security skills onboard. We will be training and certifying their technical team in order to provide both sales and post-sales services,” added Hichert. “We expect our partners to offer first-level support as it creates additional revenue opportunity for them as well as helps them in forging strong relations with the end-customers. Level 2 and 3 support would be provided by the distributor.”
Astaro is also eyeing the Managed Security market and is looking for strong MSP partners.
The vendor has earmarked an aggressive marketing budget for creating brand awareness and generating demand among target customers. “Worldwide, we are a premium UTM brand that competes with the likes of Check Point and Fortinet. Our target audience is 100 to 1000-user customers. We are the fourth largest security appliance vendor in the world. Our security appliance range matches that of Check Point and Fortinet not just in technology and features, but also in terms of products range across software, hardware and virtual appliances,” he claimed.
Apart from standard UTM devices, Astaro plans to focus on the UTM appliances for wireless networks. Priced $150 to $300, these devices act as wireless controllers and will be launched in August. One of its products recently launched in India, the Astaro Remote Ethernet Device, is for remote branch office and costs an estimated $300.
According to Hichert, Astaro range starts from `1 lakh onwards for a 100-user full featured UTM and goes up to `5.5 lakh for 1,000-users. The vendor currently has seven UTM models for the Indian market.
Astaro already has 40 customers in India, each having, on an average, 300 concurrent users. Some of the major customers include Akshardham Temple, ISRO and Caparo Maruti. The vendor is also looking at opening its development center and a technical support center in India soon. |