Data Security is crucial for all-sized Businesses!

How would you rank the Indian SMB vis-à-vis' the global or APAC's SMB market vertical?
For us, an SMB is 100- to 999-seat office and above this would be large enterprises. SMB business in India has a huge potential as it offers limitless opportunity to IT vendors. With increased awareness and adoption of IT by SMBs, it will be a next wave most organisations are looking for. The roadblock for them was the complexity of the technology and the problems associated with its deployment. We took note of this challenge and now everything has been simplified for the benefit of our customers. The technology available can be integrated really very well with the product that they are using and can be deployed easily without any trained personnel. So, we are seeing much better adoption of this technology as it takes care of their challenges. Though I cannot map it to the global trends, but seeing it from the Indian economic perspective, it is definitely picking up. The Indian SMB is growing at a faster rate and hence is looking for effective solutions to match their pace.

What offering does Symantec have for the data protection of the SMB verticals?
According to IDC, the rate at which the data requirement growth is happening at the customer’s end is far higher than the rate at which the IT investment is scaling at the individual customer’s end. That is one big challenge posed before us. The AMI Partners study reports that the Indian SMBs were expected to spend $3.7 billion on IT infrastructure in 2009. This will further increase in the current year. Meanwhile, a Gartner report expects the market to grow 13 per cent in 2010 as the revenue will total $16.3 billion.

Another typical trend is that a lot of duplication of data exists in the organisation at every employees or team members end within a department. So, at the time of backup, the duplication of information also happens. Information Systems Group at Symantec is managing the information which gets created at multiple locations. The backup data has to be protected and then it has to be made available in any kind of situation. Also, in the case of data loss, it becomes our responsibility to help the customer retrieve and recover the lost data, as they also do not have the required trained IT staff.

The Back Up Exec 2010 is for the data archival for the SMB. We have Enterprise Vaults which take care of the archival data.

Please explain how do you position your data backup solutions in India?
Symantec’s channel partners' primary business model is focussed on selling and installing hardware, software, or services to offer complete solutions to customers. Besides augmenting our partner base in all our current regions, we will be building large partner ecosystem in the B-class cities across India.

Our channel community is classified as Platinum, Gold, Silver and registered. Symantec’s Platinum Partners deliver the highest value to their customers and demonstrate expertise in multiple Symantec solution sets, consistently achieving revenue targets and attaining a high level of customer satisfaction.

Our Gold Partners are experts in delivering Symantec solutions to their customers and have a high measurable level of customer satisfaction. Our Silver Partners have achieved proven success in the marketplace with Symantec solutions and our Registered Partners are organisations interested in taking the first step to build relationship with Symantec.

What is the total number of solutions you are offering to the SMB vertical that they can choose from as per their requirements?

Backend 2010 is a product family and there are various agents for specific applications. But as such it is a complete solution that customers buy depending on what applications they have. So, from the customer’s perspective, it is a complete package.

What is the cost of the initial investments required for an SMB customer?
In this case, there are no additional investments that we mandate. The technologies that are integrated from time to time can be deployed on the normal and standard servers and the SMB customers are free from doing any kind of investments. So, that is the beauty of this as you need not incur any additional investment costs. Also, the Back Up Exec 2010 is easy to deploy and while offering this particular solution to our partners, we make sure that the customers can do it on their own. So, it does not require any additional service support.

What is the USP you are banking on for positioning these solutions?
The solution ensures that the data could be duplicated at the source. Most of the customers prefer to have the duplication done on the source, but we also offer other configurations where the deduplication can happen on the backup servers or at the target device. So, our USP is to ensure the deduplication or virtualisation support is really easy to use.

In such a case, what is the role of the channel partners if your solution deployment does not require any high skilled manpower? 
We make sure that the channel partners are more trained and aware of the technology and the challenges that the SMBs face and how these solutions are positioned to the customers. The more they can handle challenges and share a more effective and congenial relationship with them, the better for them and for us in return.