Symantec voted most preferred
By Jamsheed Gandhi
The market for security products catering to the enterprise is growing at a healthy 35 percent year-on-year. The industry is quite fragmented, with a few pure-play vendors garnering a share of the pie. These players have carved out a niche of the enterprise security pie by focusing on specific functions such as anti-virus, firewalls, filtration, authentication, bandwidth management and appliances.
A recent survey estimates that the IT manager spends almost 15 percent of the company’s IT budget on products related to enterprise security; these range from anti-virus at the personal desktop level to unified threat management (UTM) applications at the backend.
Price-performance
Value added partners have voted technology as the number one criterion while delivering a security solution. This included parameters such as product features, reliability, quality, ease of installation and profit margins.
Symantec has been polled as the leader, followed by Trend Micro and Sonicwall. What has worked in Symantec’s favor is the scalability that it can achieve due to its brand recall as the preferred choice in the anti-virus solutions that are currently deployed in most desktops. So is the case with Trend Micro. Products from Sonicwall and Fortinet are on the rise as they belong to the new generation of UTM appliances that are fast gaining popularity.
Channel relationship
Following price-performance, vendors have voted channel relations as the second-most valuable criterion. Because selling an enterprise security solution requires management buy-in, the sealing of a sale depends heavily on the channel partners relationship with clients. In addition to value added partners, the manufacturers depend heavily on IT solution providers to work together with channels for delivering the proof of concept of the solution.
Once again Symantec has been polled as the leader, followed by Trend Micro, Sonicwall and Fortinet. Since Symantec and Trend Micro are already established players they have come up as leaders. Products from Sonicwall and Fortinet target the large enterprise, and so they need a limited number of partners to push their solutions. In spite of this, both Sonicwall and Fortinet have recorded over 100 percent increase in sales of their appliances since last year.
Training and certification
Channels have expressed the need for regular employee training in order for their sales and technical staff to interface knowledgeably with customers, and have ranked it third.
Although all the four have a similar training model with their partners, Sonicwall has been voted first followed by Fortinet, Symantec and Trend Micro. As UTM appliance providers need to show a proof of concept solution before the client places an order, their channel partners need to be regularly trained.
Service and support
Since enterprise security products are not sold off-the-shelf, there are not many negative issues that the channels have faced while delivering the appliances. Thus, they have ranked support as fourth.
Symantec leads followed by Trend Micro, Sonicwall and Fortinet. Although these companies provide UTM appliances, their core focus is on developing the software that drives the appliance. Most of the hardware is outsourced for contract manufacture to Taiwan or China, and then shipped out of their global distribution center which is based in their home country. From placing the order to delivery takes an average of 2-4 weeks. The feedback from the channels is that this is an acceptable delivery time for their clients.
Marketing and branding
Products need to be sold as a solution, and most vendors are emphasizing on developing relationships with clients; channels have rated this parameter as least important.
Symantec has been voted first, followed on by Trend Micro, Sonicwall and Fortinet. This is once again based on the immense brand recall that Symantec and Trend Micro have due to their desktop anti-virus product, while Sonicwall and Fortinet have focused themselves on marketing their product range to the CIO/CTO.
Conclusion
The enterprise security market is seeing healthy growth, both by traditional anti-virus companies as well as UTM appliance manufacturers. Anti-virus companies are scaling their product range up from the traditional desktop, and UTM appliance manufacturers are positioning themselves as the gatekeepers of data from and into an enterprise network.
Intro
l Microprocessors l Hard Disk Drive l Flat Panel Display l Optical Disk Drives l Desktop l Anti-virus l Notebook l Inkjet Printers l Laser Printer l Server l Networking l Enterprise Storage |