"India is an up-and-coming market for us"- Mahendra Negi, Group CFO, Trend Micro

Trend Micro recently had its global Group CFO, Mahendra Negi, visit India for the company’s annual Channel Partner Day. With India having become a vital market for Trend Micro globally, Mahendra shares that in the coming years, India’s contribution to the company’s overall revenue is projected to be a significant percentage, buoyed by the accelerated growth over the last few years.

In 2018, Trend Micro witnessed robust growth across its enterprise business in India. Currently, the company has a dominant market share in the local banking sector, with many of the customers adopting its hybrid cloud security solutions for server and data center protection. Trend Micro’s customers in India include the top five IT and IT-enabled services (ITeS) companies; the top seven energy companies; and all three private telcos.

Speaking on the company’s long-term commitment to the India market, Mahendra Negi said, “India is an up-and-coming market for us, and presents a huge and strategic opportunity for our business. The key investment for us right now is in training our people; that’s why we have launched the new certification-granting program in IT security (CPITS) in India.”

“There is a big technology shift underway. Cloud infrastructure continues to evolve apace and security in the hybrid cloud environment is getting a lot of attention from our customers. We also see strong demand for endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed detection and response (MDR) in India. We have invested heavily in all these areas,” he further added.

Sharing security advice to enterprises in India who are transitioning to the cloud and adopting next-gen technologies like IoT, the blockchain, and 5G, he said, “Don’t just tick the security box to fulfill compliance requirements. While compliance is part and parcel of a holistic cybersecurity strategy, the driver for security should center around risk assessment – figuring out what are the intangible assets of a company and how to protect them.”

A leader in hybrid cloud security, Trend Micro is able to provide protection throughout a company’s entire cloud journey, from on-premise servers, virtual servers, to cloud workloads. In 2018, the company launched a new solution for containers – the next big trend in application development in the cloud era. Currently, the company observes strong uptake of private cloud from the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector; and that of public cloud from the manufacturing, e-commerce, IT and ITeS sectors, and born-in-the-cloud businesses.

The focus areas for Trend Micro in India this year include Apex One for advanced endpoint security, hybrid cloud security, network defense, and connected threat defense – Trend Micro’s approach to providing enhanced visibility across the entire IT environment. New local customer acquisitions from 2017 to 2018 include the State Bank of India (SBI), BHEL, the Syndicate Bank, Lupin Pharma, Bandhan Bank, PolicyBazaar, and Capillary Technologies, to name a few.