India as country is increasing becoming very relevant to the global IT ecosystem. Not only does it have world’s large IT service providers but there is a surge in product manufacturers but IP creators. Courtesy various conducive government policy and incentivisation, India has emerged to the 3rd largest start up ecosystem creator in the world. Out of them around 21 have become unicorns. Specially in the space of cyber security and AI the number is growing and world has started noticing the soft power. WhizHack Technologies is one of those powerful make in India brands into cyber security domain. Kaushik Ray, COO. WhizHack Technologies analyses the entire situation and opines his perspective and goal.
“Channel partners, who for years have sold, deployed and managed foreign products, have an opportunity of leveraging their deep customer relationships in aligning with the right security companies like WhizHack Technologies”
Kaushik Ray, COO. WhizHack Technologies.
The Rs. 290 Billion Cyber Security market in India is largely dominated by foreign vendors. However with emerging geopolitics, where the whole World is witnessing fluctuating polarisation, India is witnessing a strong push from the top to become ‘Self Reliant’ in cyber security. There is massive demand amongst Government departments for ‘Made in India’ security products, as India tries to manage the complete security ecosystem within the country. With recessionary trends and cost pressures, private companies are also adopting these products as they are far more cost effective and come with better local support.
Channel partners are vital for all technology companies, including cybersecurity for widespread market adoption. Cyber security channel partners in India are looking for solutions that can not only predict cyberattack even before they occur but also provide complete visibility, advanced detection, response, and scalability to the customer through software tools, standalone solutions, managed services, vulnerability analysis and consulting, outsourced technology support etc on their AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) driven platform.
Channel partners, who for years have sold, deployed and managed foreign products, have an opportunity of leveraging their deep customer relationships in aligning with the right security companies like WhizHack Technologies that provide entire gamut of Products, Services and Trainings to manage large to small scale complex security challenges across length and breadth of India. The company has been significantly funded by global PEs that allows strong marketing programs centred around their entire portfolio under ‘Defend Digital India’. Channel partners now can access entire portfolio of ‘Made in India’ products that can allow enterprises and Governments in strategic areas like Finance & Banking, Manufacturing, Services, Energy, Transport and Defence to be completely ‘Self-Reliant. As WhizHack is the only ‘vertically integrated’ cyber security major dealing in Products, Services and Training, Channel partners get to also work with customers in meeting large range of requirements across their organisation.
Indian security startups like WhizHack have ushered in deep technology innovations in specific fields like Defence, Power, Banking, Academic Institutions etc. and are building long term partnership with channel partners that revolve around knowledge transfer for empowering channel teams at the last mile. This will bring down overall cost of ownership for Indian customers and create high value sustainable ecosystem across India.
The channel also faces some potential challenges with massive digitisation and omnipresence of cloud which has reduced the power of channels to certain extent. Almost everything is offered “as-a-service” these days. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS)—and the list goes on. X-as-a-Service (XaaS) delivery has initiated an era of business model revolution. The question, however, is whether XaaS will simply become the de facto way of delivering technology and doing business? Or if multiple business models will co-exist alongside XaaS ?
This is where Indian deep technology companies can make a difference in building a differentiated and decentralised security solutions through ‘knowledge-as-a-service’. Security is evolving at massive scale and new age companies like us are leveraging their knowledge partners like IITs, Rashtra Raksha University etc. to constantly train and upgrade knowledge of sales and support staff so that they can collaboratively resolve most complex security threats with customers. Our ‘Made in India’ threat detection product TRACE and Zero Day cyber-attack prediction and remediation engine Zero-Hack can protect both Enterprises, Governments and SMEs at the most competitive value.
Once we congregate as an industry and put our faith in our products is when we can delve deeper into putting together the business model and pricing. India, traditionally has been a volume, not value, market. The proliferation of Chinese mobile and their popularity amongst channels is a case in point. However, cyber security is a highly sensitive category where deep suspicion against Chinese products prevent it’s adoption but ‘Made in India’ products provide a far better mass market adoption option hence we have somewhere achieved the first step into building self-reliance. Deep tech ‘Made In India’ companies like us are adopting a 2 pronged channel policy- Providing end customers with superior alternatives to foreign products at lower cost and higher efficiency. This way channel partners can provide superior ROI to their existing base as also provide localised product support, Secondly and which equally important is to upgrade channel partners as MSSPs (Managed Security Service Providers) through vertical wise product and training portfolio, strong marketing programs, continuous knowledge upskilling of sales and support associates and healthy channel margins. Channel partners are able to upgrade themselves higher up the value chain instead of just providing transactional utility in sales and/or support.
