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Eric Chong

Trend Micro Is Bullish On Cloud And Virtualization

Interviewed by Radhika Nallayam Fri, Jan 29, 2010

image We have moved beyond our traditional anti-virus business into datacenters, infrastructure security and virtualization. image

Eric Chong Regional Marketing Director, APAC SMB, Trend Micro

Partners who focus on SMB segment are generally small and they need a lot of handholding from their principals. What are your initiatives on this front?

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CHONG: We have always been keen on how we can provide additional value to our channels. Most of the vendors today want to associate with bigger partners. But we felt that it’s important to have smaller partners as well. A couple of months ago, we had discussions with about 1000 SMB partners, across the APAC region. These partners are constrained by their existing resources as they can’t invest on growing their businesses like their counterparts in the enterprise segment do. So, the basic question they ask us is how, as their principal, we can help them in doing more with their existing resources.

That is the reason why we have our portfolio of SMB products which are extremely easy to use. And these products also help partners in monitoring what is happening at the customer’s end. So, partners can now build services around these products and offer it to their customers. This is a new business opportunity for the partner. This is just one of the highlights of our partner offerings. Moving forward, we will have more such offerings for our partners as well as our customers.

How important are these SMB partners for you in the Indian market?

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CHONG: We currently have more than 200 SMB partners in India. We are planning to double this number by end of this year and will also bring more value propositions for them.

Our aim is to make it easy for them to do business with us and get more out from the whole relationship. As I said, we don’t just sell a product. The product has the in-built capability that allows partners to offers services around it. It helps partners because most of them are now trying to move away from transaction business. Moving forward, we are going to make it easy for the partners to get trained on our products and services. We will put more people upfront to help our partners and also to make our messages more clear to them. We are going to roll out a solid plan for our SMB partners in the next one month’s time.

Within SMB segment, which verticals do you think are important for you?

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CHONG: I think the enablement we have built around our products is useful for all verticals. So, right now we are not focusing on one particular vertical and ignore the rest. We have made it clear to our partners in India as well that we are open to do business with all types of customers.

SMBs, especially in India, usually prefer to buy from one vendor. Will this benefit your competitors like Symantec who have got into more territories like storage and system management? Trend Micro, even now, is largely a pure security software vendor.

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CHONG: As a vendor, we have actually moved beyond the traditional anti-virus business. We have gone into data centers, infrastructure security as well as virtualization. So, we now address larger issues of an SMB. We also believe that virtualization is going to be a green field and security is an important factor in virtualization. So our focus on virtualization and cloud is definitely going to give us an advantage. Besides, we are also bullish about our cloud offerings to SMBs. We expect that SMBs would soon start adopting hosted services and gradually move on to other cloud services as they scale their businesses up.



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