That’s how Kaushik Thakkar, Co-Founder & CEO, Nevales Networks describes his company during this interaction with Pankaj Maru and talks about the journey of Nevales cloud based security device and its potential demands, go-to-market strategy, relocation of headquarters in the U.S.,and much more.
Excerpts…
Its been close to 2 years or so, since Nevales came out with the first product version. So what kind of changes have been made in the product in these years and how much the product has gained maturity and acceptance in the market?
Initially, when you start a product company, you want some product and market fixed validations. So we did came out with our product, took it to small office small home customers and SMEs with roughly 50-100 people or users. We got lot of feedback from them in terms of form factor of the product, configuration related problems, clogging of fans due to weather conditions, network port issues, many people using wireless internet backup as well as wired connection simultaneously. So we learned from all that and came with the second version of the product which was more moving from device on to the cloud. We were looking at how can we manage the device, we migrated from VIO processor to Intel Atom and also supported MIPS platform.
So you can say Nevales is a software company that delivers through hardware. And the third version, gained critical mass with couple of 100 customers, placed a smooth process for remote management, IP addressed based and multi-configured features. So we got the product validation from customers, added features and even addressed the price points for the device that works for customers investing in security. And now we are taking our products to enterprises and our product has gained market validations as well.
Which verticals are you focusing with your security product?
When you come up with new product, you try to go across all verticals and see where it gets more demand. In our case, we see high uptake and traction in the education sector, where the device is largely used to block adult content in the schools. Then we have car dealerships, with small offices, point of sales with some inter connectivity, but needed security for connecting at the back end with the cloud servers. Today lot of car dealers are using our product.
Going forward we see demand coming from banks and finance as there are lot of branch offices that are not connected, they are running on legacy system, MPLS connectivity and needs to migrate. We see whole of retail sector including Cafe Coffee Day, which is our customer. We have small offices, shops coming up and retail stores getting connected back into cloud with internet infrastructure. And we also see healthcare pharma as potential sector.
How you aim to go ahead in the market?
We are going to work with SI partners and have already signed Wipro for Indian, Middle East Asia and Japan region. We are talking with other partners also, but since we are a small company, so we can’t have too many partners and want to be profitable as well. Besides, we want to have carrier relationships so that we can go to tier II and III cities and tap SMBs in India. Also, one of the used case coming up is with the 4G infrastructure, where carrier relationships would play vital role to drive security products in the market.
Why you shifted headquarters to the U.S.?
When we started with Nevales some 2-3 years back at that time the scene in Europe was in mess, while the U.S. had lot of folks in the consumer technology like Facebook. At that time, India looked exciting because we saw an unfair advantage here compared to Silicon Valley and being from Indian origin, I wanted to have a high tech company in India. So initially, we started our base in Mumbai, closer to our customers but as operations expanded, we shifted our engineering base to Bangalore given the availability of talent resources.
With more business expansion coming, it made more sense to move to Silicon Valley as it is easier for international contracts and agreements with customers and also today people are more adoptive to American way and culture. While in India, we faced lot of time consuming legal complex processes and issues, so we decided to shift the headquarters to the U.S., as it makes more sense for our international business.
Are you looking at markets in Asia other than India for your product?
Yes. We being a Swedish kind company we like to do things one at time. We initially started with India, rolled out Mumbai operations than came up with Delhi and then Bangalore recently. So we have done things step by step and with the headquarters shifted to Silicon Valley, we can easily expand our international operations to other markets. Wipro is already going to take us in the Middle East region, while Silicon Valley office will focus on product management and marketing with specialization. So even going to new markets in South East Asia for selling our product, that would be easily be done from Silicon Valley as it has a strong ecosystem rather than via India.
How much competition are you seeing in the UTM security device space?
I would say UTM is a device based security and that space has not been disruptive or innovative in last 18 years. If you look at UTM products from CheckPoint, M86 Security or others, there’s not much of change or difference and you need highly skilled technical person to configure it. However, security is not a device its a service that needs to evolve with time and constantly updated. So when we talk of cloud based network security its a natural evolution.
We saw how Gmail disrupted Exchange, we saw how Siebel got disrupted by Salesforce and we believe Nevales in network security will also be disruptive in the same manner. But when it comes to cloud based network security there are not many like Zscaler and Proticor as far as our knowledge goes.
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