Riding high on recent growth in customer acquisition growth and widen portfolio rollouts, SonicWall is highly focused on mitigating CIO challenges by delivering integrated cloud-scale management and true end-to-end security that protects networks, email, endpoints, mobile and remote users for enterprise customers
From an overall Cyber Security growth PoV, how challenging was the year 2018 for global and India market?
SonicWall has made great strides this year and is not only one of the leaders in the SMB market, but is acquiring more mid-tier and large enterprise customers. SonicWall has proven enterprise-grade and cloud-based platform solutions that are appealing to businesses that are looking for end-to-end network protection and greater access to threat analytics and data that allows them to have visibility to drive a proactive security posture. We have seen major growth in India and have recorded growth in all verticals. SonicWall is experiencing strong financial performance, exceeding its objectives for eight straight quarters while also posting a world-class 90-plus percent customer renewal rate.
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“The primary theme across our rollouts is to demonstrate enhanced security capabilities of the company’s automated real-time breach detection and prevention platform.”
Debasish Mukherjee
Country Director
SonicWALL India & SAARC
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What activities you did differentiated you from competition and helped increase market share?
There have been numerous activities that have culminated in the current momentum and gain in market share, including enormous investment in R&D demonstrated in recent quarterly product and services roll-outs; targeted competitive displacement campaigns and promotions; continuous investment in the ecosystem and providing greater scope for partners to sell our wider portfolio and using GTM models that suit their needs and ability to grow their profitability.
How was customer acquisition growth? What were the customer engagement programs of the year and what was the outcome?
From a global perspective, we have well over half a million customers that have deployed SonicWall in their networks, across more than 215 countries and territories. We have also shipped more than 3.3 million firewalls, so these numbers are significant. Our customer retention rate remains high and our ability to cross- and up-sell has increased due the ease of management and deployment across our full solution stack and through the Capture Security Center.
Which verticals embraced your solutions maximum and why?
We continue to attract customers across all major verticals, including higher education, retail and hospitality, manufacturing and healthcare. We have also seen much wider adoption with distributed and mid-tier enterprise as when we expanded capabilities through our SonicWall Capture Cloud Platform, which delivers integrated cloud-scale management and true end-to-end security that protects networks, email, endpoints, mobile and remote users.
Name some of the best customers and why those were best?
Wonder Cement, ITZ India, Rajasthan Patrika, T-Series India, NDTV India, Rayalaseema and Dr Lal Path Labs are just some of our high-profile customers that use a number of different SonicWall solutions. They cross a number of different verticals including manufacturing, media, education and healthcare.
Point out some of CIO Challenges in 2018 from the Cyber Security point of view? What was the experience of SONICWALL in mitigating those challenges?
We have many conversations with customers and analysts, and profile these CIO challenges and find the common themes and pain points. We then develop them into key use cases that are reflective across many organizations. Examples include Security management for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, as many organizations struggle with ensuring system resiliency, service reliability and regulatory conformance. Another big CIO challenge is organizational mobility to ensure workers are not only are provided with high-speed access to resources over wired, wireless and mobile networks, but this access and information exchange is provided securely. Lastly, CIOs are concerned with real-time protection against advanced cyberattacks, including ransomware, encrypted threats and phishing, which continue to disrupt businesses.
What all products you rolled out in the year, what was the adoption rate of those new products?
The primary theme across our rollouts is to demonstrate enhanced security capabilities of the company’s automated real-time breach detection and prevention platform. The SonicWall Capture Cloud Platform delivers integrated security, management, analytics and control across entire SonicWall portfolio and supports a range of new products, capabilities and services. These include SonicWall Capture Security Center, which simplifies and automates multiple tasks to promote tighter security coordination while reducing the complexity, time and expense of performing security operations and administrations.
The SonicWall Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI) is a patent-pending and highly innovative new technology that protects SonicWall customers from chip and memory-based attacks and protects against malicious PDFs and MS Office files. Another new offering is SonicWall Capture Security Center Risk Meters service that provides enterprises and SMBs with data-driven analysis about evolving threat vectors that include networks, web, clouds, applications, endpoints, mobile devices and databases. Other offerings include SonicWall Secure SD-WAN, Zero-Touch Deployment, Capture Client endpoint protection platform, Network Security (NSv) virtual next-generation firewalls for public, private and hybrid clouds, Web Application Firewall (WAF), NSa 3650, 4650, 5650, 6650, 9250, 9450, 9650 next-generation firewall appliances, NSsp 12000 firewall series designed for distributed enterprises, data centers, universities and MSSPs, TZ300P and TZ600P unified threat management (UTM) firewalls that provide power directly to connected PoE/PoE+ enabled devices and several major updates to SonicOS.
