Information
Rights
Management (IRM) is essentially all about managing the right
to an information, deciding who can access what and when. In theory,
this market is present where there are documents and emails
containing confidential information. Seclore
Technology is one of the
pioneering companies in this space and is bullish about the scope of
this market. Vishal
Gupta, CEO, Seclore Technology said, “There are no independent
analyst estimates for the size of the addressable market in India but
the comapny estimates it to be close to Rs 160 crore per annum,
growing at almost 100 percent at this stage.” The key verticals,
which the company addresses are BFSI, government and telecom,
engineering services and manufacturing. For the last six quarters, it
has been doubling its quarter-on-quarter revenues.
The company
has six partners in India and about 18 worldwide. It is slowly
looking ahead to expand its base in India. “There are plans to grow
the Indian base from six to 10 for entering new markets, where it's
partners are not present as of now. The company is actively looking
at partners with a strong base in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kolkata”
shared Gupta.
As far as the company's channel plans are
concerned, Seclore plans to grow its channel support program in 2010.
The program will focus on increased channel sales and technology
support. Gupta highlighted some details, “There is a team of
trainers that will go around the country and sometimes to partner's
offices, for training and enabling their sales and delivery teams on
Seclore FileSecure. Besides these trainings, the company also plans
for joint marketing with the partners in the form of events and trade
shows. The amount of connect that the company has with the channel
sales force is definitely going to increase and we already have a
more informal program of connecting with the sales team on a weekly
basis.”
According
to him, Seclore's market building activities in 2010 will revolve
around one objective ie customer education. “In our belief IRM
technology and its drivers are not well understood amongst the
business community in India. In 2010 we intend to take up activities,
which will educate customers about the existence of these
technologies in general and company's products and their
differentiators in specific.
This
will be in the form of online seminars and webcasts as well as
brick and mortar events and seminars. The primary objective of these
would be to educate potential customers on the
need for Seclore FileSecure as well as show how existing customers
are using the technology effectively,” said Gupta.
Speaking
of some of the challenges in the market, Gupta said, “The
challenges in this market are centered around dealing with the
vagaries of existing IT infrastructure at the customer location. From
a partner perspective, issues typically center around the lack of an
existing large market for our products.” Seclore operates in a
space, which is rapidly growing and evolving. However, mass
market
enterprise adoption is still nascent. For example, amongst the
banking and financial service companies, the early adopters like
ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Kotak Bank, Reliance Capital, HDFC Standard
Life, and Bajaj Allianz have all deployed company's technology.
“These companies are anyways adopting new technologies earlier than
the others. There are however more than 500 banks, more than 30
insurance companies and more than a thousand other NBFCs where the
technology is equally
applicable.
The channel has the additional task of making the
customer aware of the existence of such a technology and then the
regular sales cycle. From a sales perspective this is an investment
which is more than the investment required selling other solutions in
this space like firewalls, anti-virus and channel partners should
engage with Seclore only if they have the wherewithal to take on
these additional responsibilities. However on the positive side,
investments which the channel partners make in this are reaping rich
dividends and customers are already attaching an "intelligent
advisor" tag to partners who are bringing our solutions to
them,” signed off Gupta.