With Blue Coat acquired merging with Symantec, there is expected to be a lot of integration in cards and how is it going on, whether the company can be ready for action by March 2017 so that they can begin the new year with a pump. We spoke to Sanjay Rohatgi, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec at Symantec Partner Conference, Tokyo during early November, 2016. Excerpts…
How the Integration is going on so far?
We are attacking the integration from four perspective. One is the product integration. Within 2-3 months we have already integrated a lot of products. We have a roadmap for integration of more and more. There are some products which we cannot integrate because those are stand alone in nature. The other thing is the workforce integration and we are in the planning stage right now. Every six regions including India, we are in the process of combining the two teams and working on what is the best structure that we can put in place. So, we will be very much ready for FY 18. What we have done in the interim is that we have created some incentives for our sales teams for making sure that we can cross sell and the customers get best benefits out of it.
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“My honest feedback is that ever since we have announced that we are acquiring Blue Coat, it has been received by the CISOs positively because one thing they always mention is that the challenge in this industry has been there to deal with so many vendors.”
Sanjay Rohatgi
Senior Vice President
Asia Pacific and Japan
Symantec
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Real-estate integration is going very well, which is important part of it. What is happening is that 8 out of 10 Blue Coat employees are moving to Symantec offices. The other one is IT systems integration, where we are looking at the best of the breed. So, we have already made the decisions and we are moving ahead in that direction as well. The whole ideas is that by March 2017 all the four integration is perfectly done. Having been through a lot of integration in my past career, I think it is going smoothly up until now.
In the workforce integration, we have taken a bottom up approach. We have asked people in the regional leaderships to know what is the best structure we can put in place. Our go to market will remain as same. We will focus on the named accounts, mid-markets and SMEs. In the markets where we have market maturity like Japan, Pacific and others, we will go vertical market approach to some extent.
I am pleased with how the overall integration is going. On a state of business specific to SPJ, we are showing very good growth. It has been led by Japan, pacific, India, ASIAN, Korea. It is cyclical though but the growth is strong. We are growing faster than the market, it means we are starting to regain some market share.
My honest feedback is that ever since we have announced that we are acquiring Blue Coat, it has been received by the CISOs positively because one thing they always mention is that the challenge in this industry has been there to deal with so many vendors. Now it is one less vendor to deal with. I honestly believe that the market potential we have and now with Blue Coat and Symantec coming together we have as high as 50% of the wallet share of the addressable market we can address.
Will there be any impact on the engineering team with the integration of products?
We have three thousand+ engineers. I am not very sure what would be plan moving forward. But the whole idea is when the product will be integrated, there will be a lot of engineers to support those integrations. If you look at there is no overlap in the portfolio. So, we need expertise in both sides to bring it together as solution. So, you heard about DLP with cloud access security broker with use authentication. The CASB is coming from Elastica’s CloudSOC team of Blue Coat and DLP from our side. User authentication is our VIP access. So, all these products are coming together as one solution.
There is any hardly any overlap, but there is already news that there have been layoffs.
Symantec as an entity is going to save US$ 400 million in the next 2 years and USD and US$150 million run-rate cost saving. So, we will keep people on Sales and Engineering side but on other side there will be rationalization in case of overlap. The challenge for both the companies had the coverage but now we have the right capacity for addressing the same. In each region, we have added people. In India, we have address 24-25 people.
Do you think, with both the companies coming together, there will be growth in your approach for MSPs?
The is a very good point. So that is the exact reason why we have broken the channel organization into three-four parts. One person is focusing on the GSIs and then one person is focusing on the MSPs and service providers. Because we honestly believe that majority of the service providers are looking at the cybersecurity portfolio as a big play. They have the reach and they are looking at cyber security solution as a revenue drive for them. Then we have channel partners and MID market solution providers. So, you will see four flavors coming.
