Mumbai: Retail security partners often complain about shrinking profit margins in the licence trade but as the security industry is moving towards solutions and services oriented business model, it is inevitable for partners to change their transitional business practices to explore new earning avenues in the prospering security space in India.
Govind Rammurthy, CEO and MD at MicroWorld Software said that if partners scale up their expertise and start selling solutions and give consultancy services to their customers, they can make better profits.
“Margins are not shrinking on solution selling and services but they are shrinking in the pure licence trade. There are hundreds of things the customer want other than the pure product. So if the partner top up his product offering with niche services, he can have a profitable business,” Rammurthy said.
According to the latest report by Gartner, the endpoint security industry in India is set to 1.69 billion by 2019. This growth will be largely driven by the solutions and services. Hence, it is a right time for partners to scale up their business by gaining expertise over the domain. The MSSP model is also evolving in India and many partners are exploring the growth prospects in this area.
However, the model has not yet picked up in the country as compare to other regions. Rammurthy said that Indian partners are not comfortable with the MSSP model as they are reluctant share their customers’ data on cloud.
“Many channel partners are still not aware about MSSP model. It is mostly because channel partners are reluctant to share information about their customers on cloud. Partners want to have tide grip on the information as it is going to give them leverage on the vendors. But the moment MSSPs come into the picture, they know that they will need to feed all the information onto the cloud. That is what making them scared to go as MSSPs”, Rammurthy said.
“The fact that MSSP model have not picked up in India also proves the fact that partners are the traders and not solution providers and that is the reason why they do not want embrace the cloud. But when customers will start moving towards cloud, partners will have no choice but to move towards the direction where customers are moving”, Rammurthy added.
Rammurthy believes, the enterprise security is the next big growth prospects for security vendors as well as partners as the retail business is shifting towards online. He said that partners would need to invest in manpower and technologies to gain the expertise on the domain and have better ROI.
eScan works with around 10000 partners in India, who cater to retail, SMB and enterprise business.
TCS, Orient Technologies, LDS Infortech, Raksha Technologies are some of the large SI partners of the company. Government, BFSI, Education, Healthcare are some of the key focused verticals of the company.