Cybersecurity solutions provider, eScan which claims to be a strong channel-centric brand, is rapidly expanding its footprints to reach out to every nook and corner of India. Rahul Joshi, AVP, Sales, eScan tells Channel Times, the company’s offerings and plans on the SME market partners. Edited Excerpts
CT: What is your roadmap for Indian channels?
Rahul Joshi: As part of our Vision 2020, to be the brand leader among security products and solutions in India, we are now consolidating our presence across the channel segments. As our commitment towards channel partners, we are realigning our channel and product policies to increase channel confidence and loyalty. One of the key initiatives is to have close engagement with our channel partners and our sales teams more regularly and continuously.
CT: What are the new policies in place after the new leadership?
Rahul Joshi:As said above we are now restructuring our channel policies for sales, support and marketing activities to be more pro channel and incentivize partners for their commitment towards proactive engagement. We have now also increased our channel reach program through technical training and empowerment programs for channel sales and technical teams for a better understanding of our product range and solutions, those are at par with global peers.
CT: How confident are you on selling your product in the SME and MSME segment?
Rahul Joshi:SMEs and MSMEs in India are highly segmented and fragmented with various stages of IT adoption. However, with the recent GST and digitization drive by the GoI, the SME and MSME segments are adopting to IT rapidly to compliant. Apart from these the recent spate of ransomware attacks also created awareness among these segment to take security implementation seriously to protect their data and assets.
eScan with its vast presence across SMB to enterprise segments in India has already had customer bases spread from 50-15000 end point users. We are further now taking steps to consolidate and expand our presence in these segment with our well-established technology and solutions in IT security.
CT: What are the key challenges Indian SMEs are facing in terms of securing their enterprise? How suitable is eScan solutions for their needs?
Rahul Joshi:SME segments as it states are small to medium in nature with either small or no team of dedicated IT resource internally. This is one of the major causes of worry for these segments. Also the IT asset uses are scattered and unmonitored, which could cause irreparable damage to the IT infrastructure of the SMEs. As they depend mostly on their IT supplier or SI partner for the IT requirement and maintenance, we take proactive steps to engage with these IT partners and educate about best practices of IT security and deployment.
eScan products and solutions are designed keeping in mind such scenarios, hence our products are low on maintenance and is easy to deploy. This helps our partners save on precious resources and valuable time while providing robust security to their customers.
CT: How SMEs are different from others in terms of security-led issues? Do you think the Indian channels are strong enough to tackle their security challenges?
Rahul Joshi:As mentioned above the unmonitored usage by the employees and lack of best practices to safeguard the valuable data is where the SMEs face a major challenge in terms of security breach. Such as unauthorized USB devices used in the networks could possibly create a security breach, apart from users visiting websites without being aware of the consequences, such as malware infected website or MITM attacks may happen.
As spoken earlier, we take proactive measures to train the technical and sales teams with the latest technology and solutions that are ready to defend any network from the evolving cyber threats. Our channel networks are today well versed with our products as well as the growing challenges of cyber threat landscape to protect their customer from any zero-day attacks.
CT: How many channel partners you are having focussed especially on the SMEs and Mid-enterprise solutions?
Rahul Joshi:Being a channel oriented organizations, we strongly believe in mutual growth with our valued channel partners. Today, we have more than 60-70% partners from our active 9000+ channel network that are focused on SME segments.
CT: How are you enabling your channel partners educate their customers on the latest threats?
Rahul Joshi:Our comprehensive channel program includes certificate programs for technical teams of channel partners. Whereas, they undergo a rigorous program to understand the evolving security threats and our products/solutions to safeguard their client network and endpoints. The recent ransomware attacks have further increased the need for well-trained teams by channel partners. Our latest Anti-ransomware technology – PBAE technology is designed to provide real-time protection from any ransomware attacks.
CT: What are the partner-related activities you are planning to do in the days ahead?
Rahul Joshi:Our comprehensive channel program encompasses technical, sales, and marketing training and support programs for our esteemed channel partners. We have as discussed earlier elaborate programs for sale training, incentive, marketing support and co-op marketing programs and comprehensive security certification program to empower our channel partners to provide the best security solution for their customers.
We are further enhancing the value added services such as rewards and incentive programs to recognize the proactive partners for their dedicated efforts in promoting eScan.