Lumension launches India operations

BANGALORE, INDIA: Scottsdale, Arizona-based Lumension Security, which plans to go public in September 2008, has launched its India operations, as part of its “redefined corporate strategy.”

The privately-held security management company’s India operations will be headquartered in Mumbai. It has plans to expand its footprint to Delhi and Bangalore, “based on finding the right people.”

“We will be expanding our operations locally in the next six-nine months,” Neal Gemassmer, vice president, Asia Pacific region, of the company told CyberMedia News here today, in the presence of the newly-appointed regional director for India and SAARC, Shamshad Ahmed.

The India centers will initially deal with sales, marketing and technical support. The company, currently is not looking at research and development activities in India, as PatchLink, as the company was earlier known, is already working with a Mumbai-based product firm.

On the company’s corporate strategy, Gemassmer said: “Frost & Sullivan recognizes India as the second fastest growing network security market in the Asia Pacific region. Though the business landscape in India is undergoing rapid changes, the security market is crowded with standalone point solutions. Lumension Security is shifting the paradigm from a reactive to a proactive approach by unifying best-of-breed, enterprise-class solutions that enforce and maintain security policies, reduce overall complexity and costs, and ultimately, accelerate business results.”

The company will take the channel route to its clients in BFSI, government, IT/ITeS, manufacturing, transportation, hospitality and education sectors. Lumension has appointed Bangalore-based Inflow Technologies as its distributor. Gemassmer said the firm’s system integrators will have focus on big cities as well as tier-2 cities.

Shamshad Ahmed said the company is seeing a trickle down effect in the education sector. Besides premier educational institutions such as the IITs and IIMs, a few other universities have also started implementing security solutions to safeguard their networks.

“Leveraging our global security management expertise, we plan to provide unified protection and control of enterprise endpoints across five lakhs to one million nodes in the next 12 months,” Gemassmer said. He added that the company will invest more in India as the country is one of the largest potential markets in the Asia Pacific region.

PatchLink Corporation announced its new corporate identity, Lumension Security, on September 10 this year, “to match its position as the industry’s only IT security company to deliver holistic, unified protection and control over enterprise endpoints,” according to an earlier statement from the company.

The name change followed PatchLink’s two acquisitions in the previous nine months: the STAT Guardian vulnerability management suite from Harris Corp. and SecureWave SA.

Lumension is a combination of words about light such as ‘luminous’ and ‘dimension’. The company has offices in Virginia, Florida, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, apart from its headquarters in Arizona.

Gemassmer said the company is in a strong financial footing after it received $50 million in venture capital funding. The growth of the company tripled the previous year in the Asia Pacific region, while globally, it has been growing 50-100 per cent per annum.