With a channel strength of 20000+ partners across the globe and more than 1000 channel partners in India and SAARC, Sophos is poised to reach out to small and medium businesses with cutting edge next-generation security solutions that protect businesses from next-generation threats. Sunil Sharma, VP Sales, India & SAARC, Sophos Technologies Pvt. Ltd gives an insight of his upcoming plans.
DT: What would you rate the year 2016 for Sophos?
A: FY16 was a momentous year for Sophos. After 30 years of success as a private company, Sophos became the largest ever initial public offering of a software company on the London Stock Exchange, valued at $1.6B at float. In its first year as a public company, Sophos has exceeded its key financial and operating expectations and has continued to post above-market growth in each of its core markets of network security and enduser security. Underpinning this performance were very healthy customer renewal rates combined with aggressive growth in new customer acquisition.
DT: What is the central force which keeps partners and consumers loyal to your brand?
A: Sophos’ clear and compelling ‘security made simple’ strategy resonates with our partners and customers. Our mission is to be the best in the world at delivering complete IT security to mid-market enterprises and the channel that serves them.
We follow a 100% “Channel First” sales strategy. We recently launched a new and simplified partner program and completely redesigned our partner portal with innovative remote management options and automated digital marketing capabilities. During the development of the synchronized security strategy, we collaborated with partners to support cross-sell and up-sell opportunities that simplify both the partner and customer experience.
DT: Is your company engaged in any Govt. projects specifically under the Digital India program? Please share details.
A: Sophos has empaneled key products of Sophos XG Firewall to National Informatics Centre Services Incorporated (NICSI), a Government of India enterprise under the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology.
We have been working with NICSI to understand emerging cyber security challenges and network performance problems that are faced by various government agencies and infrastructure. Our empaneled products have helped stabilized the service and rate that can be leveraged by government organizations.
DT: What’s your channel strength?
A: With a channel strength of 20000+ channel partners across the globe and more than 1000 channel partners in India and SAARC, we are poised to reach out to small and medium businesses with cutting edge next-generation security solutions that protect businesses from next-generation threats.
DT: What is your assurance for providing excellent service support to your customer?
A: We have dedicated support centres across the globe which follow a global workflow, i.e. ‘follow-the-sun’ model, which helps us provide round the clock service to customers situated in different parts of the world, with minimum delay. Apart from a strong post-sales customer service team, we also have a strong pre-sales team that helps our customers with the required technical support and training for our customers and their IT teams.
DT: What’s your roadmap or strategy for the year 2017?
A: Security remains a top priority for organisations of all sizes and continues to be a truly mission critical investment area. We will continue to strengthen our security portfolio to give simple yet effective security solutions to the mid-market enterprises and the channel that serves them. In addition to that, we look forward to synchronize security across our product portfolio in network, endpoint and cloud, to combat today’s coordinated cyber-attacks.
