Cisco bets big on security services in India

US network equipment maker Cisco is betting big on India as it sees massive growth opportunity in the country.

“Last year has been a record year for us. We have surpassed a good amount of growth rate and in Q4 we exited with about 20 per cent growth on all the parameters, products and services both put together,” Vishak Raman, Director, Security, Cisco, told BusinessLine.

“Both from IDC and Frost, we hold the market position of Number One. IDC has also reported Cisco’s 22 per cent share in a market which is highly fragmented. To hold such market share and grow in this business is quite significant for us.”

Enterprise spending on information security products and services in India is on pace to reach $1.7 billion in 2018, an increase of 12.5 per cent from 2017, according to the latest forecast from Gartner.

In 2019, the market is forecast to total $1.9 billion. Cisco, on the other hand, is expecting to grow at nearly twice the rate in India.

Indian investments

Cisco is also ramping up its investments in the country by strengthening its channel partner.

“We are skilling the right level of channels and we also opened up Cyber Range, where we train people on real-life hacking environment, real-life simulation by simulating close to 100+ attacks in a 5-day program. Our Cyber Range Lab based in Gurugram, offers training services to our customers on the latest attack scenarios and used cases. We have government agencies, public sector banks, manufacturing customers who get trained on these new cyber security skills. We are opening up our Network Operation Centre in Bengaluru,” Raman said.

Cisco also opened Security & Trust office recently where the company works closely with government agencies in terms of sharing Cisco Talos Threat intelligence. The company has close to about 1,000 R&D engineers in Bengaluru to detect these threats.

Cisco has more than 5,000 engineers globally focusing on security R&D, out of which 20 per cent work in India and are based out of Bengaluru office and work on the latest products.

Software subscriptions

While Cisco for long has focused on selling its security hardware, increasing focus on software and services model is helping the company grow faster globally. And that’s happening even faster in India.

“Right now, 30-35 per cent of our revenue is through subscription and software. Security is leading that transition for Cisco at global and at the India level. Our recurring revenue is significantly high for security and that drives the big motion for Cisco from a pure valuation point of view. If you’re in a high growth market and if you have solid services revenue, that will help all of us to propel, especially in a business environment,” Raman said.

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