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2016: Year of the Partner for F-secure
Cat Yong
on Tuesday, April 19, 2016 at 12:23:09 am
F-secure enjoys great partnership with service providers like Vodafone, Bharti Airtel, Telia Sonera and more, selling their security solutions as a bundle with these providers' broadband connections, to consumers.
F-secure's APAC Managing Director, Amit Nath said, "Fifty-five to 65-percent of our revenue has been from this segment. It is a great business model and we have partnership with service providers in every country (we have presence in).
This is especially true in the Europe region, where F-secure is a powerful brand.
"But in this business-to-consumer (B2C) approach, customers don't see you. That's one of the disadvantages of this model."
B2B ambitions in APAC and the SME focus
Amit observed that traditional cybersecurity for the corporate and business-to-business (B2B) market is showing tremendous growth in APAC. F-secure's priority is to build the B2B market in the next three to four years, and Amit shared that it would like to beat the average growth in APAC, by a pretty wide margin.
Already, markets which the cybersecurity company has invested in, is showing huge market growth, be it customer renewals or new customer acquisitions.
Amit spoke of a strategy that is focused. "We know who we want to sell to. We want to be known in the market as the company that focuses on small-to-medium businesses."
Amit pointed out, "We don't build products for the enterprise segment."
As a result, their solutions for the SME segment are not watered-down versions of an enterprise-level product.
"Our strategy is to build profitability for businessmen in Malaysia. If I can make him more profitable and help with customer acquisitions and pass on more business to him, he will always buy from me."
This almost always requires freeing this businessman up to get on with his business, instead of him always worrying about the security of his IT systems and information.
The F-secure advantage is its mix of building great products and value proposition to its channel ecosystem. "My strategy is to build a great channel ecosystem in Malaysia. Right now, we are 200 partners-strong, in a wide variety of IT security businesses in Malaysia."
Malaysia is being groomed to be the hub of Asia Pacific operations.
Besides malware detection, support and R&D teams being based here, backend shared services for the entire globe is also located in Malaysia, specifically Bangsar South.
Amit also spoke of making more investments in Malaysia, in terms of more engineers, more sales personnel and training for their channel ecosystem.
He also addressed the talent gap in the industry, saying that, "F-secure is still figuring out how to play a bigger role in public and private partnerships, to build the next wave of cybersecurity skills for Malaysia."
For Asia Pacific overall, he admitted no one single strategy for the region. "APAC is very heterogenous, every country has its own way of doing business, its levers, its drivers."
That's where the channel ecosystem comes in.
True the focused strategy that F-secure has for the region, Amit also shared that F-secure in APAC wants to be the leader when it comes to building the best channel experience for partners.
"We want to create maximum value for channel partners. 2016 is the year of the partner, for us," Amit concluded.
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Amit NathAPACchannelF-securepartnershipsSME
Cat Yong is Editor-in-Chief of Enterprise IT News.
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