“Kaspersky realigns with ComGuard for Enterprise”

To focus on Enterprise business and provide enterprise solution to the corporate, Kaspersky has reappointed ComGuard as a National Distributor. The two together will focus on 1000 and above customers with the new advance security products and services to develop joint go to market strategy in the areas of Endpoint, Security and Targeted Security Solutions, including addressing BYOD challenges. Altaf Halde, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab, South Asia reveals to Bhawna Satsangi about the company’s strategy and future plans.

Please throw light on the company’s strategy for Indian enterprises?

Under the distributorship agreement Kaspersky and ComGuard will focus on the corporate sector in a big way. We already had presence in India and working with some distributors in India but in early part of 2013, our company came up with new advance products targeting corporate sector and the target customers for that is 1000 plus. During our quarterly meeting with the management we came to a conclusion that with our present partners we are not able to do justice to the potential that exists in the 1000 unit and above. So we need to either upgrade the skills of the existing partners or to have somebody who will come up with some kind of expertise and then take it forward. So we picked up ComGuard as they are well known as what Kaspersky does. In the last two years they have done lot of investment in India as well so it’s not only that they are big in Middle East but also in India they are doing major investments. So we thought that this is good opportunity keeping in mind that there are new products so we need to go and reach the large enterprises and for that we need a good partner.

What are the challenges you foresee while targeting enterprise segment?

Whenever we go and talk to any customer or a corporate house, he is already invested and using some existing solutions whether it be end point or at the network level. Our biggest challenge lies when the customer says for example I am already using Semantic or MacAfee so forth so why should I change. They are more happy enterprises living with the problem rather than changing and creating more problems. So our strategy is going to be to tell the customer to first test the product and once you are satisfied than we take the complete ownership to make sure that there will be no problem and again it’s a software product there are bound to come issues but the kind of trust that you gives to the customer that in case if there’s anything comes up we are there to back you up. So once that confidence is given to the customer there’s no reason that why he would not want it to change. We understand that when we talk to large enterprise they are not going to change the 1000 or 10,000 machines overnight, so we ask them to give us a pilot, let us showcase the product to you and that is where he gain the confidence in the product and when he sees the kind of support we are offering him that makes him to opt. So we have seen success in the past and now ComGuard on board with us it will be much bigger.

What are the issues that you will be targeting for the enterprises and how do you see security solution network in India?

When we go and talk to corporate house today they have got bits and pieces of solutions. They have got anti-malware solution what we call as antivirus, a solution for patching. Today when you use internet explorer or adobe, it only asks you to keep it updating so they have got a patch management software. Then organizations are using laptop so want to ensure that when a laptop is stolen so the data should not get in wrong hands so they do encryption and lastly they have lots of users coming in with smartphone and tablet devices so they have got a solution called mobile device manager but the challenges that are faced that these are all in bits and pieces and there is no central management, there’s no simplicity in the way it should be managed, you need to have expert level people to know what product is. So what we offer to them is the consolidated solution which will take care of all this four aspects. Our main differentiator will be that we are offering everything under one platform, under one console and under one cost. With this offering it is possible to change the customer’s thinking.

What kinds of capabilities are required to bypass the protection?

There’s no 100 percent protection available in this world and if somebody’s talk about this then he is lying to you. What we do with our solution is that we come close to it of offering that kind of protection. In our scenario the hackers are always one step ahead but we at Kaspersky, our expertise is basically to protect the users from malware, hacking et cetra. Lot of organizations has ethical hackers so they know how these people will think and they are able to come up with proactive solutions in the beginning before the problem comes so that is what we are offering to customer.

What kind of training sessions you give to stop the malware practices?

One of the reasons we feel that we will be able to justice to our solution is that every product in the market is good but what sense of differentiator is the user who are managing it and trained properly. If they are trained properly they will not call up anybody for help because they will be able to take care of the basic problem. We spend a lot of time in hand holding when the product is installed. We ask the customer to give us a team of 2-3 people so there’s a back up. We do training, give them documentation. We also have a internal newsletter which we sent to customers to update them about the new additions, software in the company.