ESET CEO, Richard Marko, says the anti-virus company has gone from strength to strength in 2014, boasting double digit growth across all its regions, including APAC.
ESET is in the process of bringing its local office online in Sydney, now 10 staff strong (and still hiring). It also recently announced Open Channel Solutions as a premium partner and has been on an aggressive partner recruitment drive.
The company claims that since the beginning of the year it has signed about 100 resellers, with half of them being active (sales every month). Its plan is to reach 250 resellers by the end of 2015.
It has just completed its partner conference, which enables the company to showcase its latest products and present business best practice to its partners, alongside team building and networking. It also used the event to announce its new line of business products.
“We’ve redesigned from scratch our whole new product line of end point protection for different platforms, and a new line of business products,” Marko said.
“They will be coming with some new technologies, especially with malware protection which matches current trends – such as zero day exploits and botnets - that cyber-criminals are using. We don’t think you can find anything comparable in what the competition is offering.
“Our new range of business products will launch in North America before the end of the year, and the rest of the world in early 2015. This is aimed at the biggest and most complex enterprises. We want to expand our business in the large enterprise segment.”
The company is in the top five security vendors worldwide, and he wants to see it hit the top three in 2015. Part of the company’s growth has been its 100 per cent channel focus, with a focus on quality and service. Marko says this has seen it take market share from the biggest vendors, including Symantec, Trend Micro, Intel Security and Kaspersky.
The company’s success has come from its single-minded strategy for the market, a key advantage Marko said comes from its private structure.
“I think the fact that ESET is a private company and has had the same ownership for more than 20 years, means that we can have this long term strategy. We don’t change our strategy just because of a board, shareholders or other outsiders, so this is attractive to our partners as well.”
The company is also planning an Australian reseller event in early 2015 to reach out to its existing resellers and pull in some new ones. He declined to break out Australian specific market figures.
“Australia we are doing quite well, but its just too early to release figures. We are really expecting it all to kick off when the new office actually starts operating, and the whole partner network we are still assembling right now should start making an impact. We are expecting quite a big increase in revenues in the next year.”
