F-Secure markets security as a SaaS offering in India

 Helsinki-based €154-million online security company F-Secure is targeting the corporate, small and medium enterprise (SME), and government market in India using the software as a service or SaaS model.

F-Secure country manager (India and SAARC)  Amit Nath told Deccan Herald the business is gaining traction since it was launched in April last year, gaining 70 customers every quarter. F-Secure, which has so far invested about $1 million in India, is targeting to double its headcount from 15 this year and grow at a fast clip of 50 per cent.

“The overall size of the Indian security market is $200 million. Of this, $100 million is taken up by the consumer business. Of the remaining, the licensing business which operates on the capital expenditure model dominates. But we are trying to do something totally different,” Amit Nath said.

In the SaaS model, customers are billed for only what they use. The advantage is that customers can scale up or down based on their needs on a monthly basis. Also, the billing is considered an operating expense (opex).

“Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) love this model because opex can be deducted from the top line in the profit and loss (P&L) statement, unlike capex,” Nath explained. Besides, it is also cheaper, he claims.

He said deployment works on a client-server model where the server on the customer site connects to the F-Secure server to download updates and patches regularly to install them on all client devices.

F-Secure is present in India since the past seven years. Earlier, it was operating a white-label business wherein it would provide security to telecom service providers, which would in turn offer them to broadband customers as their own branded offering like Airtel PC Secure. Nath said that business still continues with clients like Vodafone, MTNL, and QTL, besides Airtel.

Win-win for small biz

F-Secure sees conversions happening to the SaaS space from 50-, 100-, and 300-device establishments, for whom the enormous investments needed to install servers, CRM (customer relationship management) tools, ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, etc. are an unaffordable luxury.

He foresees large-scale adoption happening when businesses in clusters like, say Tirupur, en masse go for security as a SaaS offering. F-Secure recently received a vote of confidence when a Delhi-based steel company with 700 employees became a customer.

Nath says F-Secure, whose chief research officer Mikko Hypponen is credited with taking down the Sobig.F botnet,  is specialising in the verticals of endpoint security, data centre security, gateway security (email and Web), data leakage protection, and encryption in India.

“In all these businesses, we have 10 per cent of the market,” he claims.