UTM market growing 30pc YoY in India: SonicWall

BANGALORE, INDIA: SonicWall has been a market leader in India in the SMB space. It recently introduced the enterprise E-class UTM, thereby, strengthening its position in that space.

SonicWALL has also been very committed to improving performance and productivity of businesses of all sizes by engineering the cost and complexity out of running a secure network. Over 1 million SonicWALL appliances have been shipped through its global network of channel partners.

Subhomoy Biswas, country manager, India, discusses the company's plans for India, as well as its revolutionary enterprise E-class technology with CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: What is SonicWALL’s plans and strategy for India?

Subhomoy Biswas: SonicWall is a Sunnyvale based company with global presence in 48 countries. We came to India in August 2005. We were selling earlier, via a distributor. We shortly took over leadership position. We have been growing for past three years at over three-digit percentage. India is also the fastest growing counrtry for SonicWall. Market acceptance has been great.

All of our business is done through channels. We have two distributors -- Select Technologies and Redington. We also have 80+ Medallion partners -- these are our authorized resellers. Both of our businesses have gone up. This October, we launched Enterprise class products. We operate in the security space -- especially UTM -- email security, SSL VPN -- and strengthened this with the acquisition of  Aventail; as well as CDP (continuous data protection).

All of these solutions are targeted at enterprises and SMBs. We are a leader in the UTM SMB space globally and in India.

We launched UTM for enterprises this October -- an appliance based on a 16-core CPU. This is the first of its kind. We have an SSL VPN for low-end -- from 20 users and goes up to 200 concurrent users. By acquiring Aventail, we now have SSL VPN for enterprises -- and can go up to over 5,000 users.

CIOL: Elaborate on SonicWALL’s new, revolutionary enterprise E-class technology.

SB: This is the same UTM box based on the 16-core CPU. Cavium is making the chips for us. All of our customers get a toll free number. Any customer can call the TAC (technical assistant center) -- one is in Pune and another in Bangalore. The TACs cater to worldwide. We have an RMA Center (return to manufacturing). If a box gets damaged, it can get replaced within 24-48 hours. This RMA works only within the country (India).

Our product ranges from 10-user UTM box to over 1,000 users UTM box. In a month, we will typically have six or seven returns. The low failure rate is our USP.

CIOL: Can you expand on SonicWALL’s leadership position in the Unified Threat Management (UTM) space?

SB: In India, we are going at a breakneck speed. In the SMB space, we are the market leaders in India. We have over 2,200 customers in India alone.

The Internet is used by everybody. We have a lot of installations in factories, retails, airlines, banks, stock holding companies, telecom, and also in government, like railways. A lot of educational institutes, like IITs, also use our solutions.

The market is still growing in India very fast. More and more smaller companies are witnessing the usage of Internet in their business. Security has become de facto. Users want one box. So, the demand has been growing rapidly. In India, the UTM market is growing 30-35 percent YoY.

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.