Fiaaz Walji, the senior director of sales for Websense Canada, said during a break at the recently concluded InfoSecurity conference in Toronto that his company is a big player worldwide, but not so much in Canada.
The former Corel channel chief came to Websence Canada because he believes the country could be a greenfield market opportunity for the company’s products.
The company is about to launch an SMB related product called Websense Express that comes with a new pricing structure for customers with 1,000 seats or less. This product release and the company’s impeding purchase of its No. 1 competitor SurfControl has put Websense on the map in the U.S. and other parts of the world.
But Walji’s mandate is to build Websense’s presence in this country. He believes a 100 per cent indirect sales strategy through experienced channel partners is the best path to that goal. Walji has hired Chris Diomedi from HP Canada to head Websense’s channel operations in Canada.
Currently Websense has 100 partners in Canada and Walji wants it to grow in geographic areas across the country and in some specific vertical markets such as telecom and education.
Websense Canada is offering double digit margins starting at 20 points with no hard fixed costs. With high end services, a reseller can command bigger margins with reccurring revenue licenses streams.
“You do the sales cycle and the product goes in and the customer renews every year. As a company grows, they will have changes and even if policy changes they will require more of the channel partner’s services,” said Walji, who is the chief executive in Canada.
He also believes that the major players in the security space such as Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro are not competition. Websense wants to be an additional security layer on top of Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro.
“We help customers who do not think they have vulnerabilities,” Walji said.
A recent FBI survey found that security providers are unable to create patches for specifically targeted attacks on individual Web sites such as last year’s Super Bowl site on Doplins.com.
“Anti-virus is reactive based,” Walji said. “Anti-virus and firewalls are necessary but are not efficient and what you bring back from that Web site is not blocked. Websence proactively prevents you from going there.”
Websense categorizes good Web sites such as sports and shopping related online portals, while enabling customers the ability to choose the sites employees can surf.“We can’t restrict everything and most do not mind staff surfing, just not all day and not Playboy.com,” Walji said.
Websense’s future product strategy is on leak prevention, a technology for internal threats. “This keeps the good stuff in. This is the next step. It is where the security world is headed. It is pre-emptive and proactive blocking technology,” Walji said. Important data such as environmental lists, customer SIN numbers, CAD drawings, credit card numbers can be protected with leak prevention software, Walji said.
According to a Gartner report, between 80 and 90 per cent of leaks are either unintentional or accidental. The total cost per record lost is $182. “Can you imaging a million records lost at $182 per?” Walji said.
Walji suggests that channel partners should be looking for new security technologies such as leak prevention because anti-virus has become a commodity. “The next thing in security is the protection of the crown jewels of the company. This is the next big step for the channel to sell. Customers will be asking (resellers) what are you doing to keep the data inside our organization,” he said.
