WE WANT TO BRING WOW FACTOR WITH OUR DYNAMISM, R&D

In an elaborate discussion after coming at the helm of India operations, Sunil Sharma, Managing Director, Sophos India, spoke to Amit Singh to share how company’s focus on R&D and end-to-end security enabled it to move ahead of the curve over the last three years; he also highlighted his business and channel priorities over the next few years and the winning opportunities for channels with Sophos

It has been more than three years since Sophos acquired Cyberoam. Please take us through the achievement highlights of the last 12-18 months?

Sophos India business is now in a very robust shape. The product offerings have improved significantly over the years. While Cyberoam was mainly into network security appliances, with Sophos we are providing end-to-end security, including endpoint security and network security.

Moreover, all our Cyberoam customers have been quite happy with us as we provided them a seamless migration. We offered the free upgrade to our Cyberoam and Sophos SG UTM customers to our new Sophos SF operating system. This way, we have saved the investments of our customers and partners, both.

In fact, being in the security industry for the last 25 years, I haven’t seen much smoother acquisition than this one. The manner in which we seamlessly transitioned our customers and partners with us is tremendous.

On the revenue front, Sophos clocked $632 million in FY2017, globally, which is approximately 20 percent growth from the previous fiscal. Moreover, our cash flow has tripled over the last three years from $46.4 million to $122.4 million in FY2017. Our tremendous growth also reflects from the 222 percent rise in our stock price on the London Stock Exchange.

In India, we have grown by over 100 percent in the last three years, and India ranks among the top-10 countries for Sophos in terms of revenue growth. The highlight is that we have a highly motivated internal team as well as channel partners, who have grown with us. Moreover, channel partners from the competition are joining Sophos. In fact, almost 12 large partners from competition have joined us over the last 6 months. In a nutshell, Sophos and its partners have grown pretty well together.

As you recently came at the helm of India operations, what are your top priorities for the next 12-18 months?

Our priorities revolve around our partners and customers. We have a huge existing customer base that is using our network security appliances. We are targeting to ensure similar success with our end-point security solutions as well.

We have built a robust endpoint security portfolio led by our revolutionary solution, Intercept X, which we launched in September 2016. Intercept X is a next-generation endpoint security product that stops zero-day malware, blocks all exploit-techniques known today and includes an advanced anti-ransomware feature that can stop both known and unknown ransomware variants within seconds. It offers anti-ransomware, exploit prevention and root cause analysis in a single product. In addition, it is centrally managed by cloud-based management platform, Sophos Central, which gives single point management of your endpoint, mobile, encryption, web, email, server, and wireless security.

The best part is its compatibility with other vendor products; hence the customers need not bother about replacing their existing security infrastructure. This is the reason it has been very well received by the customers and partners.

Moreover, as we acquired Invincea, a security vendor with deep capabilities in AI and machine learning, we are integrating the next generation technology in our products. In fact, we have already introduced deep learning-driven malware detection through Intercept X early access program.

Secondly, we are committed to driving partner profitability through various programs. We are enabling partners who are focused on network security to cross-sell endpoint security and vice versa. Hence, our partners will be able to leverage on both, network and endpoint security portfolio.

I believe that finding a new customer is lot more time- and cost-intensive than going deeper with the existing customers. Hence, with Sophos training and enablement programs on network and endpoint security, partners will be able to go deeper into their customer accounts and increase profitability.

In addition, we have recently launched our MSP program in India, which has been quite successful in Europe, US and EMEA. I am sure that this program will enable partners to move customers from Capex to Opex. Under the program, partners will be able to remotely manage customers’ security through Sophos Central. While it relieves partners to hire large chunk of engineers to manage security at customer-end, it also gives them the flexibility to increase or decrease users at a click of a button and to bill customers accordingly.

Further, we want to drive our focus on innovation and dynamism by pro-actively responding to the market. In fact, Sophos is the only company offering synchronized security solutions. The security posture of the organization is complete only when its network security and endpoint security talks to each other. Our competition is not even thinking about this.

In all, we want to bring the wow factor by virtue of our dynamism and R&D capabilities.

Does Cyberoam as a brand still exists? How have you leveraged the Cyberoam legacy?

Cyberoam as a product and brand is available and our customers are truly delighted with the fact that we are offering full support and development. In fact, we are investing huge sum and man-hour to gain the confidence of our existing customers. As of today, we will continue to have Cyberoam as a brand and a product; however, our leading brand will be Sophos. Hence, Cyberoam will continue to be a product of Sophos brand.

Our commitment to Cyberoam reflects in the fact that the Sophos R&D team joined hands with the research team of Cyberoam to launch a new product called Sophos XG two years back, which incorporates all the salient features of Cyberoam and Sophos SG. In fact, we recently introduced the 17th version of XG, which has been quite well received by the customers. Hence, the customers are appreciating our innovations in the existing products, which give us an excellent customer loyalty.

Further, we are proud to state that almost all our Cyberoam customers are loving the new SF operating system. Moreover, we have come out with quite lucrative offers on the XG series for the customers using Cyberoam for over 3-5 years. And, we are getting an enormous response from the partners and customers.

What are your recent channel initiatives? What are the winning opportunities you see for the channel in India with Sophos?

Besides our MSP program around Sophos Central, we have recently launched the Sophos Partner Program in May 2017, which covers all the partners on the entire range of products including Cyberoam.

We are driving channel enablement programs where we are enabling partners on XG series and endpoint products like Intercept X. In fact, in the current quarter, we are imparting architectural training to partners’ engineers.

Besides, every quarter we introduce incentive programs. Under one such program, we are offering $1000-2000 to partners on the addition of new customers on Sophos endpoint security. Further, we have Sophos Sales Samurai program where we incentivize and develop partner representatives as our extended arms.

Moreover, in order to have partners’ more say into the policy decisions, we have recently started Partner Advisory Council (PAC) to take feedback from partners. We have 6 partners from India in the regional PAC for APJ. In addition, we have Channel Influence Community where we have over 50 partners from India.

Our unmatched channel initiatives have enabled us to grow India partner base to over 800 active partners currently, of which 150+ falls under silver, gold and platinum categories.

Sophos has recently introduced Cloud Security Provider Program at GITEX 2017. Is that program available for India partners as well?

We have very recently introduced this program in India; rather we have not launched it in a formal way yet.

This program is primarily focused on ensuring partners utilize our offerings for platforms like Azure and Amazon. A lot of Amazon and Azure partners are selling cloud solutions where they can introduce offerings from Sophos. This is quite a new initiative where we will start focus from April onwards.

We are seeing a trend towards machine learning and artificial intelligence-based security solutions. Please elaborate how Sophos is working towards this space? Please highlight your investment plans for India?

We are building a robust portfolio with machine learning and AI capabilities. With our recent acquisition of Invincea in Feb 2017, we have introduced Intercept X Early Access Program (EAC) for our partners and customers. Moreover, we are incorporating machine learning in all our products and solutions. To enable this, we have increased workforce for the development of AI and machine learning solutions.

Further, India has a large role in our business worldwide as over 800 people work in India out of the total strength of 3000 globally. India has three development and support centers, two in Ahmadabad and one based out of Bengaluru. In fact, having 28 percent of our global workforce residing in India reflects the kind of commitment and focus we have on the country.