“In Japan, sales has grown 300 percent from the year before," said Charles Cousins, Sophos Asia managing director.
"Overall, sales growth in Asia exceeded 700 percent compared with 2001,” Cousins said.
Without disclosing specifics, he told CNETAsia the firm plans to support the business boom with investments in areas such as marketing and distribution channel development.
Cousins hopes to expand the current 45 partner base to 100 by the end of 2003.
Existing distributors include Lanworks and Systems Design in Singapore, eLock in Malaysia, Dataworld in Hong Kong, Microgenesis in the Philippines and Softnext in Taiwan.
“So, we will not flood the market as this leads to price erosion, reduced margins, and reduced capacity of resellers to adequately support their customer's IT security needs,” he stressed.
Most security software providers offer a host of solutions in addition to their enterprise and home user antivirus offerings. These typically include products such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
Sophos, on the other hand, is a niche player which specializes solely in corporate antivirus programs, a strategy it claims to be the hallmark for its present success.
“Because of this focus, corporate customers come to us because they are assured of the utmost attention when emergencies occur,” said Paul Ducklin, head of Sophos global support.
“They know they don’t have to vie with a barrage of consumers for customer service in case of a virus outbreak,” Ducklin added.
It currently has regional offices in Japan, Australia and Singapore. The Down Under is also home to one of Sophos' two global virus analysis laboratories, apart from England.
The company has over 450 customers in Asia including Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, Taiwan National University and Malaysia’s Universiti Malaya.
Security is one of the few IT bright spots which is bucking the downward economic spiral. According to research firm International Data Corp, worldwide security spending will grow from US$66 billion in 2001 to US$155 billion in 2006.
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