SonicWall is experiencing strong financial performance, exceeding its objectives for eight straight quarters while also posting a world-class 90-plus percent customer renewal rate, says Debasish Mukherjee, Country Director, SonicWALL India & SAARC, who also talks about Cyber Security and channel growth.
From an overall Cyber Security growth point of view, how challenging was the year 2018 for global and India market?
SonicWall has made great strides this year and is not only one of the leaders in the SMB market, but is acquiring more mid-tier and large enterprise customers. SonicWall has proven enterprise-grade and cloud-based platform solutions that are appealing to businesses that are looking for end-to-end network protection and greater access to threat analytics and data that allows them to have visibility drive a proactive security posture. We have seen major growth in India and have recorded growth in all verticals.
How was SONICWALL performance for this calendar year from a global as well as India perspective?
As a private company, SonicWall does not disclose detailed financial metrics globally or by region. However, SonicWall is experiencing strong financial performance, exceeding its objectives for eight straight quarters while also posting a world-class 90-plus percent customer renewal rate.
What all activities you did which differentiated you from the competition and helped you to increase market share?
There have been numerous activities that have culminated in the current momentum and gain in market share, including enormous investment in R&D demonstrated in recent quarterly product and services roll-outs; targeted competitive displacement campaigns and promotions; continuous investment in the partner ecosystem and providing greater scope for partners to sell our wider portfolio and using GTM models that suit their needs and ability to grow their profitability.
How was the channel growth for SONICWALL? What all the channel programs you had rolled out in the year?
The SonicWall SecureFirst Partner Program was rolled out in early 2017. Since then, more than 600 partners have joined the program across India & SAARC. Our development of partner enablement and education tools has continued within our online SonicWall Partner Portal and SonicWall University, the interactive training platform. SonicWall partners always have access to the latest training and information to position and sell SonicWall competitively in the market.
How was your customer acquisition growth? What were the customer engagement programs of the year and what was the outcome?
From a global perspective, we have well over half a million customers that have deployed SonicWall in their networks, across more than 215 countries and territories. We have also shipped more than 3.3 million firewalls, so these numbers are significant. Our customer retention rate remains high and our ability to cross- and up-sell has increased due the ease of management and deployment across our full solution stack and through the Capture Security Center.
Which verticals embraced your solutions maximum and why?
We continue to attract customers across all major verticals, including higher education, retail and hospitality, manufacturing and healthcare. We have also seen much wider adoption with distributed and mid-tier enterprise as when we expanded capabilities through our SonicWall Capture Cloud Platform, which delivers integrated cloud-scale management and true end-to-end security that protects networks, email, endpoints, mobile and remote users.
Name some of the best customers and why those were best?
Wonder Cement, ITZ India, Rajasthan Patrika, T-Series India, NDTV India, Rayalaseema and Dr Lal Path Labs are just some of our high-profile customers that use a number of different SonicWall solutions. They cross a number of different verticals including manufacturing, media, education and healthcare.
Point out some of CIO Challenges in 2018 from the Cyber Security point of view? What was the experience of SONICWALL in mitigating those challenges?
We have many conversations with customers and analysts, and profile these CIO challenges and find the common themes and pain points. We then develop them into key use cases that are reflective across many organizations. Examples include:
- Security managementfor hybrid and multi-cloud environments, as many organizations struggle with ensuring system resiliency, service reliability and regulatory conformance
- Organizational mobility to ensure workers are not only are provided with high-speed access to resources over wired, wireless and mobile networks, but this access and information exchange is provided securely;
- Real-time protection against advanced cyberattacks, including ransomware, encrypted threats and phishing, which continue to disrupt businesses.
Name some of the best performing partners and why they were so good?
We recently held our annual India Partner Summit (15-17 November), and part of this event included recognizing many of our best performing partners for 2018. They were selected based on different criteria including sales performance, % growth YoY, and cross-portfolio pipeline development. The winners were as follows:
- Emerging Partner of the Year – India (West) – LDS INFOTECH
- Emerging Partner of the Year – India (North & East) – TC INFOTECH PVT. LTD.
- Emerging Partner of the Year – India (South) – COMPUTER WAVES
- Emerging Value Added Partner – SAARC – CONNEX INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES (PVT) LTD
- Enterprise Partner of the Year – India (West) – NETWORK TECHLAB (I) PVT. LTD.
- Enterprise Partner of the Year – India (North & East) – HITACHI SYSTEMS MICROCLINIC PVT. LTD.
- Enterprise Partner of the Year – India (South) – RAKSHA TECHNOLOGIES PVT. LTD.
- Pillar of Excellence – Bronze – DC INFOTECH
- Pillar of Excellence – Silver – DM SYSTEMS PVT. LTD.
- Pillar of Excellence – Gold – ECAPS COMPUTERS INDIA PVT. LTD.
- Pillar of Excellence – Platinum – ITCG SOLUTIONS PVT. LTD.
- Star Distributor of the Year – INFLOW TECHNOLOGIES
What all products you rolled out in the year, what was the adoption rate of those new products?
There are too many to list, but the primary theme is to demonstrate enhanced security capabilities of the company’s automated real-time breach detection and prevention platform. The SonicWall Capture Cloud Platform delivers integrated security, management, analytics and control across entire SonicWall portfolio and supports a range of new products, capabilities and services, including:
- SonicWall Capture Security Center, which simplifies and automates multiple tasks to promote tighter security coordination while reducing the complexity, time and expense of performing security operations and administrations
- SonicWall Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMITM), a patent-pending and highly innovative new technology that protects SonicWall customers from chip and memory-based attacks and protects against malicious PDFs and MS Office files
- SonicWall Secure SD-WAN
- SonicWall Zero-Touch Deployment
- SonicWall Capture Security Center Risk Meters service that provides enterprises and SMBs with data-driven analysis about evolving threat vectors that include networks, web, clouds, applications, endpoints, mobile devices and databases
- SonicWall Capture Client endpoint protection platform
- SonicWall Network Security (NSv) virtual next-generation firewalls for public (e.g., AWS, Azure), private and hybrid clouds
- SonicWall Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- SonicWall NSa 3650, 4650, 5650, 6650, 9250, 9450, 9650 next-generation firewall appliances
- SonicWall NSsp 12000 firewall series designed for distributed enterprises, data centers, universities and MSSPs
- SonicWall TZ300P and TZ600P unified threat management (UTM) firewalls that provide power directly to connected PoE/PoE+ enabled devices
- Several major updates to SonicOS
What kind of revenue/ market share growth you achieved this Year?
We cannot share our numbers as we are privately held company.
