“Our focus on end-customers helped us grow”

Kindly brief us about the WatchGuard Technologies' solution offerings.

WatchGuard Technologies is one of the pioneers inthe Unified Threat Management (UTM) technologyand our flagship product is our UTM appliance. Wehave also acquired a company called BorderWare,which is into e-mail solutions and we have also re-branded an appliance called Extensible ContentSecurity (XCS). Also, recently, the business securitysolutions provider has released a virtualized versionof the WatchGuard Quarantine Management Server(QMS). It is an automated, intelligent and easy touse e-mail quarantine solution, which is used inconjunction with WatchGuard XCS content securityappliances. It enables electronic messagescontaining spam, viruses, and so on to be directedand stored on a dedicated virtual quarantineappliance. The WatchGuard family of wired andwireless unified threat management appliances,messaging, content security and SSL VPN remoteaccess solutions provide extensible network, appli-cation and data-protection, as well as unparallelednetwork visibility, management and control.Extensible Threat Management (XTM) is the futureof enterprise security, as it has some new andimproved features.

Explain about the channel model or a distribution model in place for your solutions to grow your business.

We entered the Indian market in the year 2000and have enjoyed tremendous success over thelast 10 years. Initially we started aligning withtier-2 channel partners but now we have startedpartnering with tier-1 as well. We have also had a clear focus on the end-customer, which gives usa better control in the market. WatchGuard hasfour distributors in India namely iValue, InflowTechnologies, CyberStar and Round Robin. Thereare around 75 partners, which are aligned withthese four distributors all over India.

What is driving the adoption of Unified Threat Management solutions in the Indian market?

India has tremendous scope for UTM solutions togrow in the SME as well as the large enterprisespace. There is a tremendous scope in the educa-tional and government sector. Nowadays, allenterprises are becoming more and more securityconscious, as threats are increasing every day,which has been the primary reason for the marketto adopt UTM solutions. There has been anincrease of 30 percent over the last year and Iforesee the market growing further in the comingyears.

To a network, how serious are internal threats compared to outside threats?

Internal threats are a major concern, as they canbe very hazardous for the network. They can causedata leakage within the network, which can helpthe competitors gain useful information.Nowadays, data leakage prevention is an importantterminology and we at WatchGuard also have thisfeature in our extensible content security device.

Kindly explain about WatchGuard's recently launched cloud-based scanning service in India.

We announced the cloud-based Web security serviceto couple with our XTM and XCS security appliances.Reputation Enabled Defense (RED) protects againstWeb-based threats, which further protects itsconsumers from several threats and delivers highlysecured Web browsing via cloud-based reputationlookup that tags URLs as good, bad or unknown.Through the help of RED, browsing is hastened byremoving the need to scan all Web traffic forthreats. Up to 50 percent of URL scanning can beshunned without compromising on security,resulting in greater and a more efficient use ofappliance resources. In India, the cloud-basedscanning service has been overwhelming.

What edge do your products offer to the customers?

Our products have superior engines in terms ofour gateway anti-virus, anti-spam, URL filteringand intrusion prevention systems. These are allcommercial tools, which give us an edge over ourcompetitors. We also have a unique feature called'upgradeability within the family', which is notwith any other UTM across the globe where wecan upgrade the model of the UTM without thechange of hardware. This can be done with thehelp of license.

What are the future plans of the company?

As we continue to grow we would add moreresources in India in the coming quarter. We arealso coming up with a release of our operatingsystem in the next few days, which has the newfeature of application Web control.

(siktas@cybermedia.co.in)