CIOL:    What are the top tech trends for SMBs in 2009?  

Amit Nath: Small and medium businesses (SMBs) today are looking to invest in easy to use technology which gets them to be productive and efficient. Investing in the right technology is utmost important. Over the years, Indian SMBs have been making a lot of investments and rapidly enhancing their security knowhow and implementing various security products as they have been driven by a need of a rapidly expanding business and mobile workforce.

There are studies which predict 2009 would be worse than 2008 where cyber attacks are concerned. SMBs need to be careful and invest in making sure that the products they buy have a end-to-end security solution which protects them against various threat vectors like the Web, Email and Files. SMBs are also facing an increasing amount of issues related to data protection and they will be looking at deploying a data leakage solution in 2009.

There are signals that SMBs may adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a model, but here, the pace is slow - there is no mass adoption.  Indian SMBs are moving slowly to enhance their knowledge on this piece.

CIOL: How liberal are Indian SMBs in their IT spends in these times of recession?
 
AN: As the evolution of SMB happened – organizations kept buying different products at different times. But during this economic slowdown, Indian SMBs do realize and are aware that they need to fully leverage their return on investments (ROI) for the security solution deployed. This means a progress towards end-to-end solutions, which means better and immediate protection against all threats in a simple, easy to deploy mechanism and centralized manageability.

The industry would move to an overall end-to-end solution that has various components of protection like from simple Anti Virus, Anti Spam to Network, Web Threats Module, Access Control and so on and so forth rather than different point products.

SMBs will continue to go through the adoption cycle and invest even in these times because their business needs are rapidly expanding and they will also be demanding a better ROI.

CIOL: Any new initiatives by Trend Micro to tap the SMB sector this year?

AN: SMB has been a very important segment for Trend Micro over years. We continue to invest heavily to ensure our new technology like the Smart Protection Network, which is a end-to-end solution value proposition, is understood better by this segment.

We have identified the growing IT clusters in India and are ramping our distribution model to make sure we reach out to them in 2009. Trend Micro will also be looking to continue to enable its India Channel Partners and provide all support so that they can help SMB organizations better as well.