By identifying the open vulnerabilities and analyzing the networks, Tenable Network Security helps manage the vulnerabilities of its customers. The company’s flagship product NESSUS, by virtue of its product, has become the standard in vulnerability assessment. Tenable Network Security is presently focussing on BFSI and service providers and also paying equal importance to the SME sector as its solutions are widely used in this sector. Though the network security is a highly competitive market, the company still offers an ample opportunity.
Discussing about the solutions and the market, Manoj Taskar - Tenable, Country Manager, India & SAARC, talked about its channel network and partner opportunity.
 Please brief us about your company and its core operations?
Tenable Network Security Solutions is into Vulnerability Management and helps customers in analyzing their networks, as to what are the open vulnerabilities in them, helping them remediate what is happening in the network. This company was formed in 2002 and has been the market leader since then by virtue of its product called NESSUS which is like an industry standard now in any vulnerability assessment. NESSUS is like defector standard in vulnerability assessment.
Any consultant, any network vulnerability manager uses NESSUS tool to do his activity. This is the tool that we have from our own portfolio and we have built a whole lot of solutions around that to ensure that costumer gets more meaningful insight rather than getting a raw launch.
Giving raw logs is one part of it, and then you got to have your own intelligence and analysis to do that, which takes a lot of time as not every user is not user friendly with the technical jargon. So we had to come up with the solution which could give them a holistic understanding to what the network is like, what are the vulnerabilities in the network and what they need to do to fix that, and when I say - to fix that, this is more from an administrator’s perspective and as we go higher off the value chain, C level. What is the C level concerned with, C level is concerned with saying how my organization’s security posture is, am I secured today?, what is the trend happening? are the vulnerabilities in my organization going up or going down? Do I need to make investments on security hardening or do I need to make investments in my applications - where do I need to make my investments? when they have to take that call, they need some matrix tool to get them that understanding, so that matrix system we provide saying this is how the security posture clear and you need to go up the origin so that is the business Tenable network security is in, helping the customers understand, see and remediate the vulnerabilities.
 Which is the area of operations that you are concerned with?
The business that we are focusing on now is banking finance - BFSI and service providers. The tool is common across the platform, be it a pharma company, a call centre BPO, manufacturing etc. Â Anyone whose maturity level to understand the security level is there, he is our customer. The focus is more on banking & finance and service providers. It is completely driven by the fact that it is a compliance-driven activity. They have more regulations, guidelines to follow and that is how we help them.
 How important is the SME segment for Tenable ?
SME is an important segment because the single largest product that we have NESSUS brand is used extensively across the market. It sells on its own merits. So the smaller companies which can’t do a continuous monitoring, they rely on that tool to do their audit assessments. So it is a very important segment for us to address.
 What is the USP of Tenable?
The USP of Tenable is to provide complete analysis, from a vulnerability standpoint for security, whether it is active or passive scanning, whether it is an event correlation - all put together.
How are your solutions different from your competitors in terms of giving an extra mileage of security?
So the uniqueness that we bring to the table is something called as passive vulnerability scanning, which none of the competitors have. Some of the places where the devices or the assets are very critical, you don’t have access to those - we have something called as AGENTS, which can sit on them and do complete assessment and feed continuous reports to us, which again is not in the competition, so that’s the uniqueness Tenable brings to the table for a customer. He can use it in the hybrid mode, so it can do the active scan, the passive scan, agent-based scan - all fit together to one single dashboard to give one single-window view on how the entire enterprise is behaving.
 How is your partner network structure in the country?
Tenable is a completely partner-driven sales company. We believe in our partners very strongly and we believe in enabling in our partners for our success.
 What kind of opportunity do you see in terms of market productions and channel expenses?
It is a dual benefit for the channel, because first it is a product sales per set. Second, the product also requires a lot of professional services which the channel can deliver to the customer. Product sales is one and then they have effected this engagement to the customer from professional services point of view, because they have to teach the customer how to use the product, generate reports for them continuously. So this is a ongoing engagement which gives them a continuous access to the customers all the time. It also helps them in upselling other products to the same customer, so it works both the side.
 How competitive is the network security market in this country?
It is very competitive. There are a lot of players in the market and everyone is competing for that type of security piece but at the same time there is enough in the market also for everyone to have. If you have a USP and if you have something which is required by the customer which you can offer, there is a place for your play. For us it’s 100% channel-driven. So we rely heavily on the channel so they can bring the value to the customer. For that we are enabling our channels enough to ensure that they can talk different for us, than any other player in the market.
 How much is the manpower strength in your company?
Tenable is completely channel-driven company so we don’t believe too much in having our manpower on streets. We have one sales engineer and myself in the country right now. I am expanding to have another sales engineer in different region to manage the entire ecosystem. The fact that we are completely partner-driven so that we enable partners, we have our distributors and they build up the entire ecosystems for us and they are the feet on the streets for us, rather than building on multiple account manager and channel manager, etc. We believe in having the partners empowered enough to drive business for us.
 Do you have a Regional Distributor or National Distributor?
We have one National Distributor only who is based out of Mumbai and have offices all across the country and we rely on him to support us. Our National Distributor is HIGHVALUE Info Solutions.
We see lots of client security already there. So how do you manage to get your share and how different and how ably you are working with your clients?
The good part is that by virtue of NESSUS PRO, we already have a foot in the door with most of the customers. So that is our product and they are using it in one movement or the other. So it is easy for us to go and say that allow us to speak to you and allow us to tell us, what are you looking to do with the NESSUS PRO and hear us as to what we have to do to bring to us to the deal. So that entry point becomes easy, the challenge starts after that, we have to convince the customer to upgrade himself from a small product to an enterprise scale product. But from an entry perspective, the largest base of any VA tool in the world being NESSUS we have a good address for the market available for us.
 What is the market share you have in India?
It is very early for me to say that because we started our operations only in May. So we are still in the phase of setting up. Tenable’s product - NESSUS is the single widely used tool across the board. It is difficult for me to categorize in terms of numbers, because it’s a retail product – people buy it today, people buy it tomorrow and they use it. If they are done with it, they just renew it again. So it’s a retail product for me to categorize and say that is the total numbers of Licences being sold, we don’t keep a track on a regular basis. It comes once in a year to us and this is the entire chunk that happened in the region and then we sell upsell on those licences directly.
