In a time when leading security providers are vying with each other to target the large market for enterprise security, the privately held Syntensia, founded in 2005, is making its presence felt by addressing the large SMB segment with a unique business model. Unlike most players who provide stand-alone solutions or devices against unified threats, Syntensia offers its customers the best of solutions against threats such as viruses, hackers, spyware, spam, and undesirable content on a subscription basis. Operating on the SaaS model, the company bundles everything into a single subscription fee, including comprehensive security features, automatic updates, patches, and 24x7 technical support, thus enabling organizations eliminate upfront costs, providing a predictable cost structure, ensuring quality of service, and the freedom to re-evaluate the solution decision at any time.

“The core idea behind Syntensia was to offer a complete suite of security services to small and medium organizations at a very competitive price. Our security services are today available at just $55 per month making it economical for the SMEs,” explains Kaushik Thakkar, Vice-Chairman of the Syntensia Board of Directors. Syntensia series of plug-and-play ready appliances integrate several crucial security features such as Firewall, VPN, Intrusion Prevention Service, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Surf Protection, Spyware Guarding, Access Management, Bandwidth Management, Traffic Monitoring, and Efficient Reporting in a single management platform. All that the customer has to do is to install a small set-top box kind of plug-and-play ready device from the company. Any additional settings are configured remotely by the Syntensia support team and all updates and upgrades are automatically downloaded over the Internet.

The Stockholm headquartered company currently has its eyes on the fast growing SMB/SME segments in emerging economies. While India is a very important market for them, they also have sales presence in Latin America, Philippines, and Indonesia.

Though Thakkar sees huge competition in this space, with its competitive pricing, continuous proactive security updates and upgrades, and 24x7 support, Syntensia is sure to win over its competitors, allowing organizations to avail sophisticated technology without worrying as much about its deployment, maintenance, and management.

Currently, the only challenge the company faces is changing the mindset of the customers. “Most companies are so used to having the large UTM appliances at high prices that they find it difficult to believe that similar service can be availed at a much lower cost with basic infrastructure needs,” explains Thakkar. Hence, to tap the large customer base, Syntensia has already engaged numerous distributors and resellers.

Also to support the growing demand for its solutions, the company has set up an R&D and customer support center in Mumbai. Apart from this, Syntensia also has a large network of distributors and resellers.

Syntensia has chalked out a clear plan for its growth. They have a strong group of both private investors and VCs backing them and recently received a funding of $3.5 million. “We are very excited about launching VoIP-on-demand to our list of services soon, which will be first of its kind in the market. In future, the plan is to tap more and more customers and give them the best by bringing out more services, improving our technologies, and acquiring prospective technology companies that would complement our growth,” says Thakkar.