Quick Heal in talks to buy encryption, cloud companies

IT security firm Quick Heal could soon enter into IoT, encryption and cloud security market as it looks to acquire companies in these domains.

“We are looking for acquisitions in the areas of cloud as well as encryption. We are planning to add next-gen products. Currently, we are in talks with a couple of global companies,” Sanjay Katkar, Managing Director and CTO, Quick Heal Technologies, told BusinessLine .

“Our endeavour is to add more and more features into our enterprise products and focus on new areas in terms of R&D. We will be investing a lot on cloud security and encryption as these will be part of our existing products as well,” he said.

Katkar said cloud and encryption are rapidly growing markets within the security domain, given the faster adoption of cloud services that come with their own set of security challenges. Encryption similarly is being adopted by companies to securely transfer sensitive documents.

Enterprise security spending (hardware, software and services) in India is on pace to reach $1.12 billion in 2016, up 10.6 per cent from $1.01 billion in 2015, according to Gartner.

Security spending will continue to grow in 2017 when revenue is projected to reach $1.24 billion.

Pune-based Quick Heal is known more for its consumer anti-virus than the high margin enterprise business.

The company launched its IPO in February and raised ₹451.3 crore.

At the time of the IPO launch, Katkar had told BusinessLine that the key reason to go for an IPO was for ‘small-time acquisitions to improve our technology capabilities’.

However, the IPO hasn’t fared well for Quick Heal so far due to tax litigation that the company has been involved in and also because of questions raised on the company’s governance practices. The company’s stock has not been able to reach its listing price of ₹321 even once. On Monday, it was trading at ₹261 on the BSE.

The company is trying to increase its revenues by entering into new product categories such as products for IoT devices and mobile phones, Katkar said.

“After retail, our focus for the last 3-4 years has been on enterprise products. And in the last couple of years, we increased focus on mobile as well as IoT technologies. We will focus on the security aspect of IoT devices both on home front and enterprises,” Katkar said.

The new products will look at securing Android-based IoT devices such as smart TVs, DTH boxes and media centre devices.

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