“We still grew over 20% in India” – Mohit Puri, Watchguard

What is the present focus of WatchGuard?

In 1996 WatchGuard started as vanilla firewall but then over the years we have evolved as a pure security player. So our current focus is UTM which have got evolved through Firewall. A UTM would have Firewall feature, VPN, gateway antivirus, content filtering, reputation enable defence, DLP and the latest APT Blocker. So, it’s a complete security appliance that we are focusing on. Apart from this we also carry our e-mail security appliance also as part of our product portfolio and the latest is our access point which we have introduced late last year. All these three security appliances we are focusing on.

How useful is the APT Blocker for Enterprises?

We have tied up with Lastline and using their signature sets which are parts of our appliance. The unknown threats which are evolving round the globe so APT primarily block those threats out of the box. We are hoping that this feature will pick up in coming days and is quite popular in West and hoping that it will be a big hit in India too. Enterprise also host lot of websites which are vulnerable so lot of attacks generate on web service, then this APT Blocker will be a good solution for Enterprise.

How are you approaching enterprise with your solution?

Our focus is in two verticals in the enterprise-one is the corporate for data center requirements and the other government. In the last couple of years we have done exceedingly well in government sector while targeting some PSUs, co-operative banks. On the other hand corporate is always our forte so these two verticals we have been doing very well for last two to three years.

Which are the verticals you see potential for your business?

Co-operative bank, government and education have been our forte.

At a time when virtualization and cloud adoption is taking place the role of security is not clear. Comment?

Obviously virtualization has been evolving in last three year but then people are now trying to merge virtualization with security. We need to understand that virtualization is very important but then security to that virtualization is equally important because these two things go hand in hand. Both have to be aligned and taken care together. So we have also come up with our virtual firewalls which we call as XTMV (Extensible Threat Management Virtualised) so we are selling that solution as well for people who want to invest money in managed security service or offloading security to data centers.

With this solution we will be focusing on ITES, BPOs where you have the data centers.

Where is the growth likely to come from?

Last year was a very good year for us despite India’s slow economic condition. We still grew over 20% in India and 27% Asia Pacific wide. Our growth came from banking and government sector because we did very well in these two verticals. 20% of the overall business came from government and 13% from banking, finance etc education and healthcare sector are probably third in line as far as our growth is concerned.

What are your channel initiatives?

We have recently re-launched our WachGuard Secure Partner Program (WSPP). We have three levels in our WSPP which is expert, professional and associate. These three levels of associations with our partners is based on their expertise, how much business they can do in the market and their competency. Based on these three factors we give them the target which is mutually agreed. We also do trainings for them from time to time to step up their expertise. We also give them certification. We have lot of channel engagement partner events across country.