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Quick Heal Technologies, a 22-year-old security software company that officials say has almost 10 million customers in more than 100 countries, is now making a push into the North American market.
The vendor earlier this year established its U.S. headquarters in Boston, and on April 28 officially announced its intentions to become a player in the competitive market that includes the United States and Canada. Quick Heal officials said the company is looking to offer small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) a more complete and cost-effective security solution than they can find with other vendors, according to Farokh Karani, director of North America sales and channels.
SMEs—those businesses with five to 5,000 employees—are forced to either spend a lot of money on complex security solutions that are made for larger businesses or to pay for offerings aimed at their market, but that leave security gaps, Karani told eWEEK.
For example, many second-tier security software makers offer anti-virus protection, but leave out other security needs, which means businesses must bring in security products from multiple vendors, he said.
“SMEs don’t need any less security than enterprises do,” Karani said. “They just need something that’s easier to use and that’s affordable.”
Quick Heal’s Seqrite family of security software products hits both needs, he said. The solution lineup offers security gateways as well as endpoint, server and mobile security. The software can be managed via the cloud. Through Seqrite, SMEs can obtain all their security software from a single source, “rather than having to go to three or four vendors,” he said.
Quick Heal, which has more than 1,300 employees, is expanding in North America at a time of transition for the security industry, which is dealing with new and growing threats that come from such trends as mobile computing, the Internet of things and the cloud. In a report last year, Infonetics Research analysts said businesses are looking for security solutions that protect them against advanced malware, data breaches and advanced persistent threats (APTs). At the same time, businesses are saying the high cost of security solutions is the top challenge for deploying new products.
“The real issue for vendors playing in the security market is finding a way to stand out from the crowd and getting buyers to pay attention, even for those that are household names,” Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics, said in a statement. “There are two ways security vendors can separate themselves from the noise: Provide an elegant solution that takes buyers from siloed appliance-based deployments to flexible virtual deployments that offer massive improvements in the detection and mitigation of even the most advanced threats. Or shorten the window to discovery and resolution once breached. Everything else is secondary right now.”
Karani said Quick Heal’s software offers a complete security solution, but that it needs to gain name recognition in the United States and Canada. He is hoping that is helped along by the large customer base the company already has in Asia and the Pacific region and the more than two decades in the industry. The company’s growth overseas was helped by a $13 million investment by Sequoia Capital in 2010. Karani admitted that what will be key now is how well its products do in North America.
“Name recognition comes with being able to prove your value to the market,” Karani said, adding that he was with Kaspersky Labs when it moved into the U.S. market in 2004 and has since seen success in the region. He spent last week at the 2015 RSA Conference meeting people and talking up the company.