UTM market growing 30pc YoY in India: SonicWall

UTM market growing 30pc YoY in India: SonicWall

Company clear market leader in India with over 2,200 SMB customers; targets enterprises with E-class products

Pradeep Chakraborty

Friday, November 30, 2007

CIOL: You have an upcoming R&D facility in Bangalore. What is its importance to SonicWALL’s worldwide activities?

SB: We have taken a 36,000sqft space in Sarjapur. We are opening an R&D center -- this should get completed by March. Initially, by the end of 2008, we should have 150 people. Some R&D work is also going on in Bangalore -- Aventail had an R&D center in Bangalore -- it has 35 people. The one that we will open will be much bigger, with multifunctional departments.

As per the work to be done here in India, we will do a mix and match R&D. There will be some software development work on UTM, email security, CDP, SSL VPN, etc.

CIOL: What is the top email security threat today?

SB: We are seeing PDF spam, and viruses in the PDFs. We have signatures on that. Our appliances check all those and stop the spams.

CIOL: Do you agree that firewalls will soon be history?

SB: Firewalls is the first thing that came out, followed by UTM. The UTM appliance cound not keep up with the speed and power for large organizations.

Enterprises were not buying UTM as there was no appliance of tremendous power and throughput. We have come out with the fifth-gen CPU. We are catering to the enterprises on the UTM box.

CIOL: How are you addressing identity access management (IdM)?

SB: We have already done SSL VPN, which are provided from low-end to high end products, giving endpoint security to customers. Enterprises look for endpoint security, and we are able to provide that.

CIOL: Recently, IDC ranked Fortinet as the no. 1 player in UTM. Would you like to comment?

SB: I will only say that we are listed in NASDAQ and everything is public. Fortinet is a VC funded company.

CIOL: What would be the outlook for Enterprises in 2008 -- as far as securty is concerned?

SB: Everyone will be looking at consolidating their networks. It doesn't mean a giant data center -- it means consolidating all branches, data banks, etc. kept in dispersed locations. This would be to give access to the knowledge database to workers, in a secure manner. They would also be looking at various means and methods of providing secure links to access this data.

CIOL: Can you tell us something about your Grid network?

SB: It is spread across two-three centers. Every SonicWall device is like a honeypot -- it gets pinged by our grid network every hour. It collects all the data and also updates that box with latest signatures and vulnerabilities. We are the only one who has sold over a million appliances, globally. As you know, we are listed on NASDAQ.

©CIOL Bureau

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