CRN has spent recent weeks canvassing resellers on their burning questions for the endpoint security vendor's boss. We put them to Marko last week, and here's how he responded...
What do you make of the emerging end-point security vendors that came to the market around 2016 and were critical of the more established vendors?
There are, from time to time, these sort of waves and in this particular case it is actually connected to the question you asked before.
Those new vendors came and said ‘forget about the old-school vendors, AV is dead, this is the next generation of solutions'. The next-generation vendors are based on using things such as artificial intelligence. What they tried to do, and are still trying to do, is develop some of the layers that we have been working on, often for many years.
Artificial intelligence has been a part of our solution since the nineties. We are now in 2018 and you can see what these new next-gen vendors have been able to achieve; usually not that much from a business perspective because it takes time to create the teams, develop proper technology and get the trust. If the technology doesn't work as announced -which is very often the case - it just doesn't work at all.
How do you stack up against your competition in terms of detection rates and false positives?
We stack up very well. We've touched on this in a previous question but in fact it is very difficult to measure these things, and often the tests that are being done are quite superficial and don't give you a full picture - but still they give an indication.
For example, we are the only company that has received 100 VB100 awards, which looks at virus blocking in British organisations and they have been testing for 20 years. It's a sign of long-term success.
What is the split between your consumer, SMB and enterprise business, and do you envisage this changing over the next couple of years?
We are moving more towards business customers from home users. Right now the business part of our revenue is more than 60 per cent worldwide and out of that the highest growth rate is connected to the enterprise business, which is approaching 10 per cent of our revenue.
That is on one hand natural, and on the other this is what we are really trying to do because the consumer part of the business is tricky. It has all the troubles of freemium products, while the business side - in particular the enterprise - is under a lot of pressure from attacks. The companies, especially the big ones that have been through troubles, are willing to invest in security because they know these kind of things can be very damaging.
What was the rationale behind acquiring the UK business?
There were several reasons why we decided to do so. The first one is very straightforward. The UK is one of the biggest markets for security and so paying proper attention to the market is logical.
The second is that by having a presence here we can focus on long-term strategies and we were able to invest more in the market and recruit more people to make stronger teams here.
The third reason is the direction we are heading towards. This portfolio of products for enterprise customers is not only the traditional end-point protection, it is also EDR and services that are related to it. We need to have direct access in the market and the best thing for the clients is to have local support. It is not only like a traditional technical support but also the expert kind of monitoring, for example, and advice that we want to be able to provide.
