WeP Solutions reinforces services focus

WeP Solutions, an IT services and security company, is reinforcing its services focus by offering its proprietary unified threat management appliance software free to small and medium businesses across the world.

The Bangalore-based company which took shape almost 18 months ago after its parent WeP Peripherals decided to demerge its IT services business into a separate company, expects that this new offering made through a portal www.free-utm.com will bring hundreds of customers for the company.

WeP Solutions is already offering security management services with its managed security services to micro, small and medium (MSM) enterprises. As part of this, the company deploys its own unified threat management (UTM) solutions at the customers’ premises, and monitor and manage it from remote locations.

About 300-500 customers who are mostly in manufacturing space, are using this service now.

“Now, we are going one step further by socialising this to the ultimate and saying that everybody should have access to this. We are taking this to open source in some sense which means users can download it free and manage it on their own if they want to,”

K Purushottam, joint CEO of WeP Solutions told Business Standard.

He said if the users still need some expert opinion or help, “Then they have to pay us a service pack fee depending upon the number of resources they want to hire.”

The UTM offering, called Ubiq-Freedom which is available under an open-source licence includes open-source software such as Squid caching proxy for the Web and IP tables for the firewall.

The UTM is offered with an online management console, designed by WeP which will help small businesses to configure the UTM without any hassle.

“The management console will be enhanced with the help of online communities, and subsequently offered as open-source software,” Purushottam added.

In March 2008, WeP Peripherals, spun out from Wipro in 2000 to operate as a separate company, had demerged its IT services business as a separate company, WeP Solutions, as part of its corporate restructuring plans.

WeP Solutions focusses on enterprise security, managed printing solutions and technology distribution.

During the time of separation, the revenue of WeP Solutions stood at Rs 170 crore with a headcount of close to 150 people.

The company said, at that point, close to 80 per cent of its revenues would come from re-selling products and solutions of global firms like CheckPoint, TrendMicro, EMC, IBM, Riverbed, RSA and VM Ware.

While the headcount of the company is understood to have crossed the 300 mark now, the company grew in single digits during the last one year. However, given the uptake it saw in the previous quarters for its managed security services offerings, the company expects the real growth to come in the ongoing fiscal.

“We launched the services model at a time when the market was challenging. But I must say that the receptivity for our model was good, and it had been a learning experience for us. Given the kind of uptake we saw last quarter, we are expecting to add lot more customers this year,” said Purushottam.

The market size for managed security services in India is estimated to be Rs 200 crore now, and growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 25 per cent.