Sweden firm bets heavily on India

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 18 November 2003, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Sweden based SSL VPN solution provider, PortWise has announced the launch of its products in India. According to CIOL, the company will be conducting roadshows in three cities, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi to familiarize prospective customers and channel partners with their offerings in November. "We just finished our second round of funding where we raised $10 million. These funds will be spent on our global expansion plans and almost 20 percent of the amount will be spent in India alone in the next year," said PortWise strategic development VP, Kaushik Thakkar. The rest of the funds will be used for setting up bases in Germany, Switzerland and Austria among other countries. According to him, the company is looking to set up a complete sales team, a global support center and a software development and testing center in India within the year’s time. He added that he wanted to position India as the APAC headquarters for the company from where the activities for Japan and Australia will be handled. "We will be 100 people strong within the next one year and nearly 40 percent of that will be in the testing and development side of our software. The development work will pertain more to adding enhancements and new features to the core," said Thakkar. PortWise’s product line consists of three products – PortWise mID for authentication of users, PortWise mVPN for secure access and PortWise mControl for better authorization. The company has 30 partners to date and hopes to increase this to 50 in a year’s time. The company said that it had already notched up three customers in India, including one in the BPO sector and one among the banking sector, along with 25 pilot projects. "I expect India to bring in $400,000 of revenue by the end of December this year. The next year, I think India will be contributing more than $ two million and that is a low estimate. Much of the revenue generated here will be reinvested for further expansion in the country. I expect the APAC region to bring in close to $five million in the same time frame," said Thakkar. Though the prices are conversions from the international market at the moment, he said that the company would be looking at a special pricing for the Indian market in the future. PortWise, which has global partnerships with HP and IBM to provide the hardware components for their products, will be looking to Indian hardware vendors for addressing the Indian market. "We have been in conversation with quite a few local brands. We should have decided on one and signed something solid by another week’s time if everything goes well," he said. PortWise is privately held with funding from Cazenove Private Equity, Four Seasons Venture and Scope. Though unwilling to give details, Thakkar said that the company had yet to reach $10 million in revenues. The company claims to have more than 10 percent of the market share in the SSL VPN market (SOURCE: CIOL)

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