The Indian-based vendor, which entered the North American market a little over a year ago, is also planning to roll out a cloud-based model for MSPs, likely later this year.
Farokh Karani, Director, North America, Sales and Channels, at Quick Heal
Quick Heal Technologies, which first entered the North American security market last year, has unveiled the 1.3 version of its Seqrite Mobile Device Management (MDM) software, with enhanced scalability and virtual fencing being the most significant of the new features added.
Quick Heal built up a strong presence in its home Indian market, and parlayed that into a significant presence in both Asia-Pacific and EMEA. They use a 100 per cent channel go-to-market, and leverage the low cost business model they developed in their home market to pay higher margins than the industry norm. Their first year in North America, specifically in Canada, has been acceptable, but they are taking steps to ramp up their business going forward.
“We could be doing better, but we are doing the right things to bring business up,” said Farokh Karani, Director, North America, Sales and Channels, at Quick Heal.
Quick Heal’s North American distribution has been focused on smaller, security focused specialists rather than broadliners or VADs. Two of them are based in Quebec, although both distribute both across Canada and into the United States as well. Karani said that while they have had a good response from partners of Valleyfield-based EIGRS, partners of Montreal-based TechWise Networks had pointed out some issues with Quick Heal’s current applicability to their business models.
“These partners have been giving us a lot of good technical feedback,” Karani said. “Many of their partners are very MSP oriented. But as good as our product is, it isn’t quite right for the MSP model. As a result, we are developing a cloud-based model which will be right for that.”
Karani also indicated that Quick Heal will soon be bolstering its distribution ranks.
“We are in negotiations with another distribution partner in Canada,” he said.
Karani said that Quick Heal’s breadth for an endpoint product sets it apart from many of its competitors in this space, with the MDM capabilities being upgraded here being an example of that.
“We have a number of different product lines, and our endpoint security is multi-layered,” he said. “Our DLP module is one of our key differentiators. Companies need to understand that the greatest threats include their own employees or contractors whom they have given access, and they need to protect from all directions.”
The addition of virtual fencing to Segrite MDM adds another layer of protection. It uses geographical locations, Wi-Fi SSIDs and time as boundaries, and allows rules to be implemented to limit device usage outside them. Alerts are sent to admins when the device enters or exists its virtual fencing.
“For some use cases, setting geographic boundaries is important,” Karani said. “If a driver goes off route, you want to know now.”
Scalability has also been significantly enhanced in Seqrite MDM 1.3. While Quick Heal’s core market is in the 500 seat and under market, they have been ramping up their ability to support larger deployments.
“Our largest deployments before were in the 4 figures,” Karani said. “Now we are on AWS, and with this version we can easily scale to over 10,000 users. We anticipate being able to get customers now in the 5 figure range, and think that we could now go to 6 figures. We don’t have a customer there yet, but this will help us compete in that space.”
The enhanced version expands blacklisting and whitelisting capabilities, allowing any specific keyword or URL to be added, as well as blocking of keywords, URLs or domains. Additional browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, are now supported. A new custom reporting feature has also been added allowing the creation of actionable statistics about all company-owned devices. New MDM automatic upgrades are also facilitated by a new ‘upgrade setting.’
“We believe we have best in class technology for our market,” Karani said. “The new machine learning technologies are great for large customers. SMBs though don’t have the budget for that, or the ability to manage them. We provide all these different layers of security, which are appealing to SMBs, who face the same threats as enterprises, but don’t have their resources.”
