India can be a much bigger market for us: Michael A Brown

Interview with CEO and president of Symantec

During his first visit to the country, chief executive and president of Symantec Michael A Brown signed a cheque of $5,00,000 for a programme to skill cyber security professionals in India in partnership with industry body Nasscom. In an interview with Surabhi Agarwal, he talks his plans for the India operations. Edited excerpts:

How important is India for Symantec?

India can be a much bigger market for us; it is already the fastest-growing globally. One out of every three engineers is in India, so it has a very big contribution in terms of development efforts. Quite a few patents originate out of India. And from an employee point of view, one in five employees is in India.

What is your expansion strategy?

It is similar to how we are expanding in other geographies. Something that I am very proud of is that we transfer the responsibility for an entire product from beginning to end to India so we are not just outsourcing. Several products are headquartered in India, for example, the product for data centre security is headquartered here. And when there is coordination required, we have a small team in Maryland, in the US, that acts led by the team in India. We are also opening a new office in Delhi this (Thursday) afternoon, which will give us much more space to expand. So one is development, second is customers and the third is government.

We feel that it is important to keep a close connection over cyber policy. We work closely with the government on the threat landscape and how can we help the government better not just by selling products —which we have to as part of the solutions — but also make available the information to them. We are delighted that the India and the US governments have a collaborative approach towards cyber security.
  You mentioned about the government’s initiatives of a National Cyber Crime Coordination Centre and a Botnet cleaning centre. Is the government doing enough to tackle cyber security?

No government is doing enough, and I would point to the US government and you possibly know about the breach that happened recently. It is very difficult to keep up with the ever increasing global threats. On the company side, let me give you an example, the cost of a breach is 10 times the average company's spending on security. So it’s difficult for companies, governments to do their part. But the key is that we have to get started. We have to make it expensive for criminal organisations and maybe we should make it unprofitable for them to go after us.

Can you share some investment figure that will go into India expansion?

Over this year, it will be facilities and people that would approach the 5,000 number. It is a big investment for us and it is only going to go up since it is a big market for us. In terms of revenue generation, Asia Pacific is pretty proportional to its share of the information technology economy and India is going to be one of the most important countries in Asia Pacific. It is right behind Japan and Australia — which are two of our biggest security markets. India is right there and growing faster.

India is in the middle of a booming start-up ecosystem. Have you looked at any interesting companies during your current visit?

We look at those companies that fit in with the strategy that is threat protection, information protection, workloads in a cloud, services etc.

So if we see an opportunity to accelerate that opportunity that is the company we will go after. Our folks pointed out that start-ups represent a potential competition for talent. It is no secret that that phenomenon is going on. It wouldn't be a surprise if they show up on our radar.