Didier Guibal, Executive Vice-President, Worldwide Sales, Websense, talks to Heena Jhingan about Indian enterprises’ security solutions buying pattern, company’s strategy, security solution offering on a hybrid model and much more. Excerpts…
Enterprises mostly have either the application or the OS approach. What is your observation on the security solutions buying patterns of enterprises in India?
India is the second largest market for us in the APAC region and has been showing impressive progress. We have just announced our Q1 results and India emerged as the fastest growing market. We are now heading to a regular double digit growth here. India is also our fastest data leakage protection market. It’s a spreading market, which is driving the security market for us. We have doubled the team size over the last two years, have tripled the support staff and also have opened a support center in India.
There has been a significant change in the way the Indian organizations buy security solutions. There are several global organizations in the country that are governed from the other parts of the world. Today we see that these organizations in India are buying solutions for the rest of the locations across the world. This is a positive change and we believe that we are well placed to support them.
Secondly, the Indian Chief Security Officers (CSOs) are proactive in terms of anticipating the risk potential. In other markets, people usually tend to react when they have usually been hit or if the legislator puts out some compliance restraint. In India, we see that the team led by the CSO is closer to the business as compared to the rest of the world and this is very impressive. This is true for some of the mature markets as well but India is one of the very few markets in the region to be reflecting this trend.
With the ever changing rules of cyber warfare what initiatives or acquisitions are you mulling to make Websense a more effective solution?
We are always looking for additional potential to our solutions. As a software vendor we are looking at either bearing or buying the best of technologies. We are a technically driven focused company and spend about 17% of our revenues on all our R&D teams spread across the world, of which half are in Asia. There are many things that we have acquired and are soon going to bring to the market. Threat forensics, Advance Persistent Threats (APT) and phishing protection are some of the things, we are trying to bring to the forefront across our offering – whether it’s web security or email security gateway. These have all been developed by our R&D teams without having to invest in acquisitions. Due to our subscription model, Websense buyers can get these included in their existing license. So, the big thing right now is getting protection on a hybrid mode across platforms.
We believe no one in the market offers flexibility to mix and match with cloud and be on the premise, which is very convenient for enterprises. There are other vendors as well who offers cloud and on premise offering, but what they don’t have is the integration of both. It is mostly ‘either and or’ situation. In that case, you cannot have a single set of policies across both — single reporting or unified management console. This is the reason we built Triton that allows the enterprises to be agnostic by consolidating management of cloud-based and on-premises security. The trends clearly are pointing toward cloud adoption globally and on premise customers today may migrate to cloud and will do it in a progressive mode.
What is Websense’s share in India and what’s your strategy to increase it further?
We can say that we are fast getting deeper in the India market. In all, we inspect between 5 to 8 billion URLs per day, this is real time monitoring of what is going on the internet. About 35,000 Websense customers are updated every 1.5 seconds. It takes huge infrastructure to keep everybody informed about what is moving on the web. So, we believe we hold a good position against our competitors in India. We plan to further strengthen the sales team. From the technology perspective, we have recently tied up with F5 and it’s our networking partner. The combination of their IT box our security solution gives unprecedented protection. We have partnerships with other players like Juniper in the networking space. We are building an ecosystem of partners which recognizes our strength in content security capability.
