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SPOTLIGHT
Fighting viruses everywhere
After three years in India, Trend Micro wants to go full
throttle, says Sushma Naik
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India is a strategically important destination for
Trend Micro because this is a high-growth market with three million PCs
shipping in this year alone
Niraj Kaushik
Country Head
Trend Micro |
Being a company whose growth depends on security concerns and viruses, Trend
Micro has had plenty of opportunity for doing business in a market that has
never dipped. As India Inc follows its global counterparts in security, focussed
vendors such as Trend Micro have seen a huge growth in demand for their offerings.
Trend Micro set up a liaison office in India in June 2001. (The company had
created a distributor network in the country before its Indian operations started.)
Today, India is a high-growth market as the company is enjoying growth rates
of 100 percent year-on-year.
Says Niraj Kaushik, the company’s country head, “India is a strategically
important destination for Trend Micro because this is a high-growth market with
three million PCs shipping in this year alone. A minuscule increase in PC penetration
results in a manifold jump in revenues for anti-virus vendors.”
Being a significant player in the Internet gateway space,
Trend Micro’s focus has always been on large enterprise accounts. The company
was one of the first to advocate the concept of protection at the gateway rather
than at the desktop. As Indian organisations began to deploy networks, Trend
Micro evangelised the fact that protection at the desktop was inadequate as
desktop anti-virus solutions dealt with only a copy of the infected file. The
original stayed at the mail server. If the server was not protected, the virus
could replicate and cost the organisation lakhs of rupees in clean-up costs
and productivity losses. With Indian organisations getting networked and actively
using the Internet, this positioning paid off.
The first milestone the company achieved was when Reliance
Industries became one of the first corporates to sign up with Trend Micro for
end-to-end solutions. This was followed by high-profile client acquisitions
such as United Bank of India and National Informatics Centre, with installations
running into thousands of seats. Today, Trend Micro’s client list contains
names like the Government of India, Life Insurance Corporation, Hughes Software,
Aditya Birla group, Bank of India, Dena Bank, ONGC, Indian Oil, VSNL, Sify,
Bharti Telecom and Spectramind. It is bullish about banking and finance, BPO,
telecom, oil and gas, software companies and manufacturing.
SMEs, here we come
The company is also bullish about the SME segment, and sees it as the next big
opportunity in India. Says Kaushik, “If we go by statistics, SME is the
fastest-growing segment today. It is estimated that in India 44 percent of the
IT spend of Rs 26,100 crore comes from SMEs. We have a network of trained and
stocked dealers, distributors and resellers that reaches the remotest parts
of the country. We have already achieved leadership in the gateway and server
anti-virus segments in India, and want to repeat that in the desktop space in
less than a year.” The shift is interesting as typically anti-virus players
have moved from the desktop to the server—Trend Micro is doing just the
opposite. As more PCs get connected to the Internet, the need for protection
at the individual desktop PC level is also increasing. The company hopes to
cash in on this wave. At its facility in Manila, TrendLabs, it houses over 600
engineers who work round-the-clock to track viruses and create protective solutions.
Plans are now afoot to extend direct support to Indian customers through the
company’s premium support programme, backed by TrendLabs’ global research
and support network.
Strengthening partners
The top priority for the organisation in the coming months is to create a world-class
support centre for its partners in India. It also intends to strengthen its
channel partner base.
“The partner meet scheduled to take place this month at a foreign destination
will be the beginning of a new phase in our partner relationships. Since Trend
Micro only sells through partners, the partner programme is one of the most
important focus areas for growth,” says Kaushik.
Looking at the way security concerns are growing day by day, companies such
as Trend Micro are well-poised to exploit the booming opportunities in India.
That said, the desktop requires a different strategy, and it will be interesting
to watch how Trend moves into this space.
sushma@expresscomputeronline.com
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