As regional sales manager for Check Point Software Technologies, Kelvin Lim heads the distribution channel in the Asia Pacific region. In his tenure of four years at Check Point, he has played a key role in leading its business development team in this region and establishing its market presence in India. Kelvin was recently in Bangalore to assess the current market dynamics besides carrying out a half-yearly business-cum-performance review with channel partners. DQCI caught up with him to find out what the company has up its sleeve for its channel.

How important is the Indian market in terms of revenue growth and market share for Check Point. 

India at present may not be among the top few markets in terms of revenue in Asia for us. But we are hoping to utilize its potential to be a key market for Check Point in the near future. It is also interesting to note that among all the countries in the region under our charge, India registered the highest growth rate during 1999-2000.

What is your channel model in India?

We have had distribution partners in India since mid-1996. Since then, we have been associated with a group of strong and diversified key channel partners in India and we will continue to support them closely from our Singapore office. We will also increase marketing activities directly from our office, with due support from our channel partners.

Globally, we work only through channel partners and depend entirely on them to provide solutions, integration, consultancy and primary customer interface. We don't sell direct or compete with our channel partners for sales.

We have been selling our security solutions in the Indian market for the past three years through our authorized partners. Check Point operates through three systems integrators in India, which includes HCL Comnet, Ramco Systems and Datacraft RPG.

We also have alliances with Wipro Infotech, Softsell, Ontrack and N&N under the Check Point Partners Program (CPP). In addition to this, Select Technologies operates as the sole national distributor for Check Point's solutions in the country.

However, depending upon the market response, we may appoint additional national distributors.

How do you compare the Indian security market with others?

Due to the apparent infrastructural constraints, the Indian networking and security market may not be as mature as that of the urban centers of Singapore or Hong Kong. However, we are very optimistic about the near-term business development potential in India, at least for us, in the network and Internet security market.

Check Point recently announced the Next Generation VPN client security. Could you elaborate on its features?

A major upgrade to the entire product family, Check Point's Next Generation has been developed to deliver advanced Internet security and VPN solutions with increased manageability, reliability and performance.

During the development stages of the Next Generation, customer feedbacks were very seriously taken into consideration so that the most appropriate solution, one that addresses real concerns of companies, could be incorporated.

In addition, Next Generation is also designed keeping the changing trends in mind, including security issues, which is of a very high importance. It is now mission-critical for the Internet and for companies utilizing the Internet.

With Internet becoming a key player in the communications game, how do you plan to use it to leverage your products?

The Internet is rapidly becoming the communications backbone, both inside a company and outside of it. It has also become a part of the challenge for players in this space.

Security is also getting more sophisticated and complex. Remote access and extranets complicate security as it grows to multiple gateways and enforcement points. More solutions are being integrated, such as intrusion detection and multi-level anti-virus.

Nevertheless, security infrastructure is growing dramatically. That is why we have Check Point's Next Generation, an Internet security solution which delivers revolutionary advances in Internet security. This makes it open, scaleable, centrally manageable and easily deployable, on a full range of platforms from small offices to the largest data centers, while enabling dramatically reduced communications costs.

What are the highlights of Next Generation's VPN client security?

Highlights of Next Generation include security dashboard, which redefines security management by providing a graphical, visual map for analyzing and managing a company’s Internet security with greater ease and control. It also features management infrastructure, which enables scalability to thousands of sites with complete centralized management for security software and licenses as well as security policies; first VPN with full auditing features.

It delivers wire-speed VPN and firewall performance to multi-gigabit levels. VPN client security delivers true one-click client installation with full remote administration as well as personal firewall integration, corporate security policy enforcement and configuration checking.

Its state-of-the-art VPN architecture delivers highly scalable and secure communication integrated with standards-based QoS while significantly reducing communication costs.

The Next Generation is delivered on industry-leading hardware platforms ranging from Unix, Solaris, Linux, Windows 2000 and Windows NT to proprietary appliance systems.

What strategy have you adopted to market your security solutions in the country?

Check Point has always maintained the business model of a strong alliance with selected local system integrators and resellers. On top of this, we have our open platform for security (OPSEC) "best-of-breed" industry-solution partnership program.

This program allows our customers to extend, enhance and otherwise tailor their Check Point-based security solution from one or more of nearly 300 vendors on this program, be it anti-virus, intrusion detection, authentication, high availability and so on.

Are you planning to have a direct presence in the country?

Given the expected significant increase in business in India in the coming years, and our intention to support this more effectively and efficiently, we have plans to set up offices in India by early 2003 if not sooner.

India contributes about six percent to our Asian sales. The first move towards our expansion plan will be having our direct marketing presence here, which would be launched shortly.

Sunila Paul in Bangalore