As cyber security solutions provider Quick Heal Technologies makes a strategic pivot towards the enterprise segment, it’s newly-appointed chief executive officer Vishal Salvi, who has previously been with Infosys, talks to Ayanti Bera about his plans for the company’s ongoing transition, how India’s cyber security market has a lot of headroom for growth and how the June-quarter headwinds are well behind the company.

How was your first couple of months at Quick Heal?

It’s been a very, very interesting three months. You can get things done much faster working in a much smaller setup versus a large corporate environment. When I was starting the conversation with them, there was a significant push towards pivoting towards enterprise security, which is really what my core competence has been for many years. So, it looked very interesting. And personally, being a practitioner for so many years, and having seen cybe rsecurity evolve for two-and-a-half decades, the next frontier had to be building products.

What will be your primary growth driver going ahead?

We do believe that there is a huge potential for us to grow in the enterprise space. Because that is where the growth is going to be in future. If you look at mature markets like North America, they have 50% paid anti-virus users, whereas in India, we have reached around 20%. So, there is a huge potential for growth. However, there is some level of stagnation right now. But we do believe that as India becomes more affluent and a much larger economy, there is a headroom for growth here as well.

How do you plan to increase your market share in the enterprise space?

For B2B, our focus right now is to create a foothold and establish ourselves in India. So, that will happen for one-and-a-half to two years. We will also tactically start looking at international markets. For the B2C part, we already have a presence in more than 70 countries, but the majority of our presence is in India. So, for B2C, we have international aspirations in West Asia, Africa and in some parts of Europe and South Asia. We have partnerships and a clear strategy in terms of how we want to grow there.

Your June quarter financials show dampened revenue figures, mostly due to lower enterprise sales. What sort of headwinds did you face?

If you look at the past performance of the company, there were certain decisions that we had taken in terms of how we want to improve on our DSO (days sales outstanding). But I think that is behind us now. I don’t want to talk about what to expect, but clearly, the worst is behind us and you can expect us to show good results and good performance going forward.

The company had previously mentioned that there was a negative impact from the slowdown in IT spending. Do you continue to see that?

There has been a de-growth in the purchase of PC and laptops in the Indian market and that has translated into some of the challenges that we have faced in the B2C segment. But our hope is that it should change and if it doesn’t, then we will have to figure out different ways to maintain and increase our market share. But the primary focus for someone like me coming here is to really do an impactful transition towards the enterprise security market. Right now, that whole space is dominated by international players. There is no Indian player in this space at all. So, we do believe that we have a very good India story here.

R&D spends are eroding a big chunk of the company’s gross margin. How do you plan to manage it?

We had some challenging quarters but we do hope that will be behind us. Our philosophy is not to have a non-profitable growth, so we will continue to focus on profitable growth while we continue investing. We have to make sure we calibrate in such a way that we go with a proper rhythm. We will not invest at the cost of profit.