“Cloud, Cloud, Cloud is the message for Businesses from Symantec”: Sanjay Rohatgi, Symantec

Sanjay Rohatgi, Senior Vice President of Sales for Asia Pacific at Symantec shares cloud plans for SMBs and mid businesses in India with PC Quest

Sanjay Rohatgi, Senior Vice President, Sales, Asia Pacific, Symantec

What are the initiatives targeted by you for the emerging enterprises?
Talking about our initiatives I would add that when you look at our GTM strategies also we have three categories; the first one involves the enterprises and government, the second one is the mid market segment and then there are small businesses. Mid market and small businesses are the major part of our growth strategy. Primarily we are looking at some verticals which includes manufacturing, healthcare, enterprises, mid market and SMBs.
In terms of running initiatives, we have a focused team in India. We at Symantec have a team that is driving mid market segment and the small businesses separately.

How are the verticals adapting technology? Are they more towards cloud platforms? What is the typical  model followed by the mid market and small businesses?
We are trying to lead the whole process through cloud.We are helping the businesses with cloud depending upon what they want. E-mail protection is offered by us and it’s done through cloud only. For large enterprises there are on-prem services as well. We are trying that businesses board cloud as soon as possible.On the other hand, whatever we have on cloud;we have the same with on-prem also and the reason behind this is that we want to have a hybrid environment all over.

What is the customer base you have in India in terms of SMBs?
We are seeing a phenomenon growth in the SMB sector. We are having several thousand SMB customers inIndia across all our working verticals in India including manufacturing, health care and public sector. Approximately we have 7000 customers in India.

How are you making customers realize the need of security?
We carry regular EDMs and updates through our partners to the customers whenever we have new releases. We are also working with our partners to figure out the requirements. The other thing is the wanna-cry incident, we have conducted a lot of webinars concerning the same. Ransom ware is becoming a large issue globally so we are pushing it to the customers also. The adoption has gone to the next level by small businesses as well in terms of security precautions.

How do you reach SMBs?
We have a full fledged team for the mid market segment. There are account managers as well. For small businesses also we have a dedicated team which actually reach out to our small customers. We reach the customers through our team and have not divided the same in terms of clusters or verticals. What we have done is we have presence in different cities through centers. We are working with the team of distributors in different cities and the distributors are working through re-sellers.

What is the contributed ratio from the mid and small businesses?
Not sure about the exact ratio but we are seeing themaximum growth in these two segments only.

What are the future plans for SMBs and mid market businesses?
We want to take these businesses to the cloud journey. We want to address the security concern for them. The whole idea is to move SMBs and the mid businesses to the cloud, that’s what our strategy is and if anybody wants on-prem we can offer that also. Cloud, cloud cloud is the message for the businesses now!