Kaspersky recently expanded its Cyber Investigation Center to KidZania. In a candid chat on the sidelines of KidZania, Jaydeep Singh, GM – India Region, Kaspersky outlines to Rajneesh De, Group Editor, CXO Media & APAC Media about their B2B initiatives, channel strategy, OT initiatives and AI leverage.
What was the rationale behind Kaspersky expanding its Cyber Investigation Center to KidZania in Mumbai and Delhi NCR?
From a Kaspersky perspective, we wanted self-education on cybersecurity to all demographics of population possible. It was not only about people working at businesses, but also for students coming out of their colleges as well as senior citizens. In fact we did a lot of CSR activity last year for senior citizens.
The most interesting bit is for children today, the alpha generation born in the Internet world. We have seen a lot of unsafe cyber behaviour from bad actors and what we wanted is that children should be aware of basic phishing behaviour, phishing scams, and general unsafe behaviour on the Internet.
This initiative is towards that direction and we feel it is a great model for children to learn. We started with KidZania in Mexico, and that was a great success. Then we replicated that in India, where we launched in Mumbai followed by Noida.
KidZania is part of your consumer business overall. What is the proportionate contribution from enterprise and consumer business in India?
While B2B business continues to see strong growth globally (+16% YoY), the B2C segment saw a slight decline of 3% YoY, impacted by geopolitical factors. Presented in early 2024, Kaspersky Next***, the company’s flagship B2B product line that provides real-time protection, threat visibility, investigation, and response capabilities of EDR and XDR, showed a remarkable growth of +158% YoY.
Last year globally, we grew by around 4% year-on-year, reaching approximately $836 million in revenue (in constant currency terms). The largest growth was driven by our B2B business, which grew 16% year-on-year, with particularly strong momentum in the enterprise segment (+21% YoY) and solutions such as Managed Detection and Response, which saw close to 90% growth. While B2B business continues to see strong growth globally (+16% YoY), the B2C segment saw a slight decline of 3% YoY, impacted by geopolitical factors. Presented in early 2024, Kaspersky Next***, the company’s flagship B2B product line that provides real-time protection, threat visibility, investigation, and response capabilities of EDR and XDR, showed a remarkable growth of +158% YoY.
Is that because there is a larger traction in the enterprise or because the consumer business is more low-volume, low-margin?
I will not be in the correct position to tell you that, but what I can tell you is that we have also realized that lots of enterprises, as well as lots of small, medium, large, conglomerates require more security solutions.
Our go-to-market for those customers has also significantly increased with respect to programs and products. That has also significantly improved our revenues in that space.
What is the current go-to-market structure for the enterprise or B2B business?
For B2B business, we segment ourselves in the channel program, the SMU program, and of course the enterprise public sector programs. These are the three GTMs that we follow today.
We are seeing significant growth in all these segments. All businesses for us are 100% channel. But in enterprise, we have high-touch engagements in some cases. There we will have senior technical people, our support team directly in touch with the customers.
Sometimes we will work with the partners for giving better services to the customer. But we will have a lot of direct conversations with customers.
And how does it differ from the channel business?
The channel could be largely done by the channel partners from a support, implementation, and distribution perspective. We normally take a back seat there.
Is it the SMB or mid-market more addressed by the channel?
Largely, yes. And we also want is that as we cannot have so many people in India. We want our partners to be trained, and for them to do a lot of deployment themselves, so that they also make slightly better margins, both up-front and back-end. Therefore, we want more and more channel partners to be enabled in that space.
We want the channel partners to take it not only to Tier 1 cities, but also Tier 2, Tier 3 cities. Cyber-resilience is required in every town, every village today.
Are you involved in any cross-selling or cross-marketing between B2B and B2C products?
Yes, we do. What happens is that we have programs like B2B2C. These are initiatives where we do a lot of collaborations across the two teams.
We could also have programs where both the GTMs merging into one. This means we might be having the same distributor for B2B and B2C also at times, for more optimized GTMs in those markets.
And beyond enterprise and channel partners, who handles the third business from large conglomerates and key accounts. Are these also addressed by channel partners only?
Yes, from a fulfilment perspective. But for the larger conglomerates and key accounts, the engagement is direct from Kaspersky.
And what happens, especially in both larger conglomerates as well as in other B2B enterprises, there are different aspects of security and addressed by multiple vendors. There will be some customers who want only a specific product from Kaspersky. We are happy to go and do that deployment for them.
They might say, okay, I want firewall from X vendor, so why don’t you deploy the XDR for us? Or why don’t you do a threat intelligence? We are fine with that as Kaspersky is the leader in XDR or threat intelligence.
But a lot of customers today are saying that, why can’t I have a single interface for my OT environments as well as IT environments. And that is the unique twist of Kaspersky.
We are able to create a single dashboard for both OT and IT with OSMP.
Especially for manufacturing organizations, there is still a lot of legacy devices where migration is happening and those are vulnerable on the OT side. What is Kaspersky doing specifically here?
What is happening is that as Kaspersky still supports legacy operating systems. We still support legacy operating systems, which are end of life by the OEMs themselves. This is to ensure our continued support those OT customers. This way we are able to create a cyber residency for those environments. Whether it is workstations or nodes, we are able to do that.
Do you have customers where you handle only the OT security or is it combined IT and OT security?
There are customers who are now wanting to go with a converged dashboard. Because for them, it is easier to manage. It is also easier for them to scale. And easier to represent the threats upwards to the board.
We are seeing some trend towards convergence now. There are quite a few vendors who are doing this.
In that case what do you count as your unique differentiators?
First, we are supporting legacy operating systems. We are supporting legacy operating systems where hardly any of the other cyber security vendors are doing that.
Secondly, we are also protecting the networks, multimedia networks, whether it is cloud systems, PLCs. We will do the monitoring part on that side. Combine that to the entire monitoring of the IT systems.
I think we must be amongst the only people who are able to do that complete interface across IT and OT today. From nodes, workstations, to cloud systems, PLCs, and the IT environment, servers, storage, endpoints. The Kaspersky open single environment platform is a great platform.
How is the conversation with the CISOs changing?
The conversation with CISOs is maturing more and more. We are seeing more acceleration towards acceptance of Kaspersky in that space both from product perspective as well as services also, whether it is XDR, ORN, NDR, or SIAM, or TI.
What is also happening is that now people are talking about expert services, whether it is competence assessment, incident response, red teaming, managed detection and response. The competence has increased significantly over a period of time for us.
In that case on the managed services front, what are the updates that are happening?
One is we are thinking of launching our own global data center out of India. We are already providing the managed detection and response, the managed XDR to customers in India. We are seeing good success there and we are confident of scaling it out to a much higher number of customers.
We have customers across all regions whether it is east, south, west, north and across all verticals, including manufacturing, BFSI, government, public sector we are seeing good traction.
When you are doing these B2B expansions, how is the B2B channel sort of looking at restructuring or expanding?
One is of course we have our traditional strong partners who have been there with us for the last 15 years, 20 years. And they have been a backbone of our strength – patinum partners, gold partners, silver partners.
What we are doing now in the last one year is that we are creating a “deploy partner strategy”. It means if I have these products, I will train your team members on those products. Then you can go and deploy those products for the customers, have better sort of margins for yourself, have better connection to the customers in response time.
Of course, Kaspersky has invested in our own support team in India also. We have increased that by nearly 100% in the last two years.
Beyond the Global Development Centre, any other key focus areas for India?
We have got BFI based out of India, and we have got global researchers based out of India. These are areas where we continue investing in. And when we do a global data centre in India, it is not only for India but also for globally other regions too. Our APAC MD just announced that in the Kaspersky Enterprise Connect which happened in February. We are moving towards that now.
On the solutions and services front, are there any new expansion or new launches planned?
It is a continuous process. We do a lot of upgrades, a lot of launches.
There will be some products which go out of sale and out of support. Because I think we want customers to go for products which enhance their resiliency much more beyond the basic antivirus.
We will encourage customers to go with the next EDR foundation, or next EDR optimum as they are based on products. And then add more resiliency with respect to server security, storage security, O365 security, and moving up to XDR over the next few months.
What are the influences of AI on cybersecurity from Kaspersky perspective?
We have been using AI for nearly 10 plus years in our life both with respect to detection, with respect to our products, as well as response. For example, today we detect more than 500,000 new malware samples every day. It is not humanly possible. We use a lot of AI to detect that.
Then we are also using AI in our tools. For example, using our AI-assisted SIA platform, Puma we are able to increase the detection rates by nearly 30%. And 30% is huge in our world.
Then with respect to support and also with respect to integrating in our overall product life cycle, we do a lot of leverage of AI.
