Spotlight

Making inroads in tier-two cities

Fortinet India wants to clock 1,000 UTM installations in 2006, and is banking on small towns and cities to achieve it, says Abhinav Singh.

From humble beginnings in 2003, Fortinet has emerged as the strongest player in the Indian UTM (Unified Threat Management) market. As per IDC, the company had a 49 percent share of the Indian UTM market in 2004. From a single installation in early 2004 to over 600 by end-2005, it has been quite a journey. Its UTM solutions are used by Air-India, the Maharashtra government, Sonata Software, Amity Business School, CNBC and Malayala Manorama. Clearly, the company has been successful in communicating the value of an integrated security appliance, which consists of different functionalities such as anti-virus, firewall and URL filtering integrated into a single box.

Small towns, great expectations

"We conducted many live demos of the product, and had to convince customers about the feasibility and efficiency of UTM" -Vishak Raman Country Manager India & SAARC Fortinet India

Fortinet expects high growth from tier-two cities in 2006. Says Vishak Raman, Country Manager, India & SAARC, Fortinet India, “We expect our products to sell in good numbers in B&C-class cities. Having already penetrated deep into the metros, we see potential in tier-two cities. We will be targeting manufacturing and BPO in particular.” The company has hired Ingram Micro as its sole distributor in the country. Fortinet has a range of 22 UTM products which it aims to take to smaller cities. Adds Raman, “We have products like the FortiManager (a device that can manage 100 UTM boxes) and FortiLog (a log analyser). These products are expected to instil customer confidence in adopting UTM technology, especially in tier-two cities.”

From small to big

When the company entered the Indian market its initial focus was on small and mid-sized organisations, but this has gradually changed and the focus today is also on large enterprises. Raman explain the shift: “Initially we felt that small companies would come forward to accept our technology because they found buying separate boxes for different functionalities to be challenging and expensive. By comparison, large companies wanted to test UTM before they went ahead with it.” Things changed when the company acquired big customers in 2004—Sonata and L&T Engineering (construction division). Elaborates Raman, “We conducted many live demos of the product, and had to convince customers about the feasibility and efficiency of the new technology.”

Fortinet believes that large service providers, in order to secure their services, will deploy UTM appliances in a big way. Raman says that “With heavy broadband penetration starting to take place in India, we expect more service providers to adopt this technology as they are looking for ease of management of security devices. There are now only one million broadband connections in India compared to 34 million in China, so the potential is huge.”

Growth to stabilise

Fortinet India has been witnessing a steady growth of 50 percent CAGR, and the company expects to grow at 30 percent CAGR. Analyses Raman, “Growth will slow down because there are many players in the market. We have achieved our targets and will continue our dominance but growth needs to stabilise.”

The company is planning to expand its sales and marketing network, and also its own sales and marketing team; it currently has three marketing offices in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

Fortinet India wants to go ahead with its existing set of channel partners rather than take on new ones. At present the company has around 22 channel partners, including Sify and Ramco Systems.

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com