Vishak Raman believes that slowdown in India is over-hyped as Fortinet has registered a significant growth here last year. He elaborated about the company's plan to extend better credit to partners and deactivating security service to end-customers who do not pay the channel for the project

The whole world is talking about the slowdown. What is your opinion about its impact on Indian business?
I think that 65 percent of the slowdown in India is hyped and we will find ways to make our economy stronger if we stop discussing it. The slowdown has more to do with liquidity crunch. Last year, while we were growing at 60 percent, people were talking about registering single digit growth. Fortinet had a record quarter in its history last quarter and in India we registered 30 percent for the same period. Right now, services and ITeS verticals have taken a hit, but it gives new opportunities for companies like us because security is bound to grow.

What kind of support will you extend to your customers during these times?
We are aware that our partners are going through a credit crisis right now. So Fortinet needs to extend credit support to our partners through our distributors. If a customer does not pay the channel, then vendors and distributors need to stand behind the channel. We should extend our support by deactivating the service to that customer and stop our anti-virus and security feeds. The distributors too need to co-operate in this. We are working on putting this disclaimer in the original contract for this and we are optimistic about it being considered.

What else are you doing to help your partners?
We are insisting on enforcing strict channel discipline. For instance, there needs to be case locking by channel partners, which will be non-negotiable. But there has to be a qualification standard for the same so that this service is used effectively. Those policies have to be made crystal clear. We tend to dilute these policies during good times. This is the time is when vendors need to be more strict about it.

Fortinet has always been referred to as a unified threat management (UTM) company. Will this continue to be a thrust area for you this year?
Yes, Fortinet has been known for its UTM solutions, but we are a lot more than just that. We are a complete security solution provider for enterprise and SMB customers. This year, since companies are looking at consolidation of their IT infrastructure and lowering costs, we will become aggressive about our concept of virtualization in security.

Already, we have deployed some projects on this technology in some verticals like airlines and banks. After succeeding in this, we are gearing our partners towards offering this technology to their entire set of existing clients. So far people think that virtualization is limited to networking, desktops and servers. When we tell them that even security can be virtualized, our partners and customers alike find it very hard to believe. Now that we have a couple of successful projects around virtualized security under our belt, we are ready to go out in the market and evangelize this concept.

Vinita Bhatia
vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in

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