Trend Micro: 60% of our global revenues comes from outside Japan

Mahendra Negi, Group CFO, Trend Micro, updates on the company’s India milestones and its planned strategic roadmap.

As a Japanese company, how does Trend Micro position itself?

There are more than 2000 companies doing security today worldwide, out of which only 60companies have got more than 50 million dollars of revenue. 1940 companies have product and feature, they are making money, or maybe they have a very small niche and that’s where they are playing. They have VC money and create a lot of noise, but in reality, they don’t have much revenue. On the other hand, only 8 companies have a billion dollar revenue.

The second point is, even though we are headquartered in Japan, we are a global company. 40% of revenue comes from Japan and 60% are from outside. We have 6000 employees, and only 800 are in Japan. One of the things we take pride in is, whichever country you engage us in, we become the company of that country.

As a premier security vendor, how has the domain evolved?

Security is going through a major evolution now, as it happens every few years. The way our business evolves is, first there is a technology change and then the users start adopting the technology and so the user behaviour changes. The hackers target the user behaviour, and that’s when they come to security companies. Hence, big technology changes usually drive a major change in the security landscape.

One big change that is happening right now is the evolution of IoT. The threat landscape is changing rapidly because the number of connected devices is growing and the hackers are trying to exploit this because they are making money out of this. The threats they are developing are a lot more complex and point products cannot solve the problem anymore.

What sort of traction do you witness across different verticals?
From the vertical point of view, we are focussing on almost all verticals. We have a team addressing govt. vertical, dedicated govt. head and team for govt. We have a large enterprise team headed by a person who has a high focus on manufacturing, services, IT/ITes, banking/BFSI and primarily large customers. There are about 100 named enterprise customers with whom we engage directly, but the business is done through partners and distributors.

We also have a team for non-named enterprises, they are still enterprise business in the commercial. We also have an SMB team who are the inbound and outbound selling team, which is sizable big and would be part of the commercial team, but not right now. Depending on the nature and maturity of that organisation's adaptability to security, there are few banks who are way ahead in the maturity of adapting security. The basic rule is anything more than 15000 users is very large enterprise.

There are 15000 endpoint customers who are still going through a maturity curve for them to even accept the need for security right now. Manufacturing, finance companies, and overall most of the large banks are in the very large enterprise and few of them in the commercial. Most of the large manufacturing companies are with named enterprises. In commercial, there are around 1200-1500 customers. In banking/BFSI, we have the widest penetration.

Out of the large 42 nationalised banks that we have including public and private sector banks, around 29-30 banks are Trend Micro customers, either on data centre or on endpoint or both. We do lead in govt. and banking batch that are the two batches who are heavily investing in cybersecurity followed by IT/ITES. Out of top 5 IT/ITES, 3-4 are Trend Micro customers. We do have a good penetration in manufacturing, pharma, service and that’s where we have our team across India.

How many govt. projects are you working on?

There are 16 states who are Trend Micro customers. J&K, Delhi, Chattisgarh, Rajasthan, MP, Maharastra, Gujarat, Goa, Kerala, TN, AP, Telangana. Either they are using Trend Micro in their datacenters or on their SWAN (State Wide Area Network) or in both. It is one of the largest penetrations when it comes to the data centre security or endpoint security in the country. We have a good govt. which is addressing most of the Smart City projects, proactively working with them and aligning in terms of how cybersecurity must be looked upon.

What is Trend Micro’s GTM strategy, especially in terms of the channel? What is the channel structure that you have in place?

We are pure as a marketing strategy change; our channel product change, customer expectations change; our ecosystem of partners also change. Of course, the conventional channel partners are also evolving. They themselves are changing their skill sets. We have one set of partners who are doing the end-to-end integration of security, they are having their own SOC, they are managing customers security incidences and they are giving them a solution, that where we plug-in our solutions with them.

We do work with Sify, IBM, and HP etc. Not all of them are platinum partners. Platinum partners are defined based on their revenue as well apart from their capabilities and it keeps on varying with particular year’s revenue. There are partners who are Large-scale System Integrators and there are partners who are specialised in one job which is the partner who does servers for customers, they build datacenters only or they do supply virtualisation platform for customers, VMware or any physical server.

They are my Deep Security partner. And there are born in cloud partners likeAWS and Azure who are big partners and they are evolving as some of the largest partners for us. They are emerging faster than you and I can think of. We have 4-5 Platinum partners in India, as their standards are too high.

Revenue, competencies and capabilities and their ability to invest in the market with us. We have 8-9 Gold partners and 13-14 Silver partners and the rests are bronze or registered partners. We have partners depending upon the verticals. If you talk about SMB business, we have 2200 partners. We do business every quarter with at least 300-350 partners.

What is the model for SMBs?

We have product design for addressing very small to medium customers who have 5 to 500 user customers. There is a separate product called WorryFreethat is designed for SMBs. They are designed in such a way that it has a minimum complexity, easy to manage for partners and multiple customers. It can manage 1000-2000 users also, but we generally restrict them to 500 users.SMBs are the really big market for us, not in terms of revenue but in terms of penetration.