"Our channel partners are our extended family"

Rajat Sahu
Product Marketing Manager Consumer - India & SAARC 
Trend Micro

After establishing a strong leadership among the Enterprise and SMB segment from last 6 years in India, Trend Micro is now poised to address the consumer segment with its Titanium Brand. Rajat Sahu, Product Marketing Manager Consumer - India & SAARC Trend Micro, speaks to VARINDIA on the latest Channel initiatives and strategies for the year 2013.  Here are the excerpts.   

What is Trend Micro’s channel strategy for the year 2013?

Trend Micro is focusing significantly on its channel ecosystem as they play a crucial role in making our products and solutions widely available. We have new channel initiatives which are designed to empower and make them profitable. On a regular basis, we will continue announcing various schemes and promotional activities to help partners earn higher rewards.

We will be introducing Trend Channel Empowerment program to enable our channel partners to sell Titanium and Worry Free range of solutions more easily and profitably. 

We are also introducing our channel training program to train the sales and technical team of all our partners to be ready for the next generation Antivirus solutions based on Cloud Technology.

What are the major challenges faced by the security market? 

The security threat landscape is growing rapidly among the consumer segments. With the increased Social media usage (such as Facebook, Twitter etc) and various online financial transactions, major challenges are faced by the unsuspecting consumers. They sometimes lose their valuable personal information and hard earned wealth in seconds. The levels of awareness and security measures adopted by the people are very low. Also, Social networking sites have seen a surge in cyber crime.

The threat landscape is becoming more sophisticated and prolific and it is imperative that the consumers opt for robust and strong technologically superior product to protect them from the real world online threats.

Please elaborate on Trend Micro’s strategy for consumer business?

Trend Micro post establishing the strong leadership amongst the Enterprise and SMB Segment has been aggressively engaging in escalating the Consumer Business. With our Titanium Brand, our strategies have been directed to address both the channel and consumers for getting the brand share.

We believe with our strong R&D strength in security domain, which has assisted us in providing the consumers in India with a robust security solution across. As we understand the Channel segment plays a major role in consumer business, we have been aligning & strengthening our existing channel partners on a regular basis.

What new initiatives have you planed for the year 2013?

We have recently launched our principal product Titanium Maximum Security 6.0 Version. We would be subsequently looking at launching the latest versions of Internet Security and Mobile Security with major up gradation.

We will strengthen our channel ecosystem and simultaneously continue to announce various schemes and promotional offers to help channel partners to attain maximum profitability and sustainable business. 

How do Trend Micro solutions help in developing a secured environment in an organization?

Our solutions make the increasing personal digital lifestyle easy and secure with prime focus on your devices, your privacy, your data and your family. They revolutionizes in ensuring maximum security, delivered with optimal performance all-in-one, easy-to-use protection for everything users and their online usage - email, socialize, bank, browse, shop, and more. It provides users with a friendly interface, simple screens, and clear reports. 

Our most advanced version of Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 6.0 encompasses revolutionary features viz. 5GB Online Storage, Mobile Device Protection for Tablets & Smartphones, Secure Document Vault, Password Management, and Parental Control facilitating in having a secured virtual environment.

Is Trend Micro looking forward to channel expansion and what initiatives have you planned to ensure profitability for the channel partners?

We have been working on strengthening our distribution channel and will appoint new partners in order to reach out to large number of audience and to ensure that the products are available to everyone. 

At Trend Micro, the basic philosophy remains that, our channel partners are our extended family and we treat them as one of us.  Our channel ecosystem plays a crucial role in making our products and solutions widely available and we have new channel initiatives which are designed to empower and make them profitable. 

Our partners work with us to develop profitable, sustainable businesses; we reward them with training, certification, specialization, business planning and marketing tools, as well as very competitive margins. We take regular initiative to further promote and empower our channel partners and simultaneously offer the best of value added services to our existing and prospective resellers with one purchase.

Please give an insight into the go-to-market strategy you have devised for the latest Titanium 6.0 version?

As our go-to-market strategy is to establish Titanium as the leading antivirus solution for the consumers, our marketing strategies have been focused towards offering optimum solutions to both the channel and consumers for getting the right amount of traction. We believe that a well-mapped channel strategy is the best way to increase the market penetration. There are set guidelines and targets to be met. 

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