LEADING CHANNEL LEADER
WE BELIEVE 2021 WILL BRING US MORE WINS AND CREATE A MORE TALENTED AND UPGRADED CHANNEL ECOSYSTEM lenges in a better way, and provide a better recommendation of the right technology to customers. Furthermore, we invest a lot of our resources with the channel community to understand their key interest areas and the business aspirations in the cybersecurity space, creating a “Partner Engagement Plan” for skill enhancement and certifications. As Steve Jobs rightly said, we need to constantly “sharpen the saw”; we have spent the majority part of the pandemic embracing and sharpening the skills of our channel ecosystem so that they can lead the customer from cyber security to cyber immunity. What is your channel strategy for this year? The Indian market still has various opportunities for us to explore. We align with the business strategy of our partners to add value to their customers which in turn create a positive business impact to our channel community at large. We have also created a bucket of qualified partners over the past year with a focused approach towards various market verticals, catering to business in Government, large enterprise, BFSI, manufacturing and SMB, among others. As customers seek more flexibility, faster inno-
vation, increased efficiencies, and a better return on investment (ROI) from modern technologies, Kaspersky will continue to empower them with services to accelerate digital transformation initiatives across industries. Needless to say, we have structured a planned and targeted go-to-market (GTM) with these exclusive and strategic partnerships and tasted success with several large multi crore deal wins already. We believe the 2021 will bring us more wins and create a more talented and upgraded channel ecosystem for Kaspersky. How have you accommodated challenges of pandemic in the partner programme or customised it? Kaspersky’s focus has always been in Channel empowerment and enablement. As a channel centric company, we depend greatly on our partner network to help us grow our business and win customer loyalty and credibility in the market. We also strongly believe the value that practical training carries, hence we helped partners create Cyber labs equipped with Kaspersky tools. This helps the channel community’s technical teams to actually experience and understand our tools first hand. Such simulation labs create a near real cyber incident scenario equip them with the much needed
experience, exposure and confidence to handle complex cyber mishaps at the customers’ place. What is your product strategy keeping the hybrid work perspective? More than product strategy, our approach is “What can Kaspersky do to resolve the cyber pains of the customers”. Although the work-from-home (WFH) scenario has been universal, the situations and challenges created in the cyber world is different for every customer. The challenges for a financial customer will be different from the ones faced by public sector. Likewise, manufacturing industries have different pain points as compared to SMBs or IT / ITES. Also given the complexity of the Cyber Scenarios today, it would be better to provide a “need-based” approach rather than a product driven one. Our range of offerings extend large and wide starting from the traditional AV to AGAV, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), Anti APT solution, Sandbox, email and Network Security. We have a strong solution stack that covers the endpoint, network and other aspects of Industrial cybersecurity, providing a multi-layered protection. We have also an increased demand towards our services portfolio such as Compromise Assessment, Incident Response, Red Team/Blue Team, Table Top Exercise, and the highly appreciated Threat Intelligence services. In fact, we will be launching our MDR portfolio as well. What is your channel spread in India, what kind of growth are you expecting this year? India is a tremendously growing and critical market for the cybersecurity industry at the moment and will continue to be so even in the coming years. The market has opportunities for everyone to explore and we look forward to doing the same with the help of our channel partners. The business in South Asia managed a near 100% growth in 2020 as compared to 2019 and we are confident that such excellent result will be also seen for this year. We have also registered a 2.5x growth in our channel engagement last year vis-à-vis 2019. Kaspersky holds its partners vital for its success – especially since 100% of its business is driven through them in India, and assure greater success and profitability to the channel community. We are working closely with our channel across Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, having a different strategy plan and alignment model at each level of the engagement. 2020 was an ideal example of our commitment and support, but we will take it a notch higher in 2021.
SME CHANNELS 65 MARCH 2021
