Trend targets small business with cloud services

Trend Micro is planning to use its software-as-a-service portfolio to spearhead a push into small business in 2009 and 2010, said Dave Patnaik, Trend Micro's Australian managing director.

As part of the move, Trend is running a campaign for its Affinity resellers to educate them on its SAAS portfolio.
The vendor is also talking to its distributor partners to find resellers active in selling cloud services.

"We are looking for a bunch of other partners who understand the SAAS model very carefully," said Patnaik. "As long as the business model resellers are working with works, I think they can sell any product they like. Our job is to find these resellers."

Patnaik said the company is exploring business models for selling cloud services. Trend is looking at two options for 2010.

"We are looking at different models. We want to make sure our partners can work with us profitably," said Patnaik. "I'm confident that SAAS is the future," said Patnaik.

However, Patnaik said that although cloud services were a major focus for the vendor, it wouldn't affect licensing products in the short term.

"Today if I looked at my licensing business it still accounts for a big proportion of it," he said.

Trend Micro's three hosted services are already established in the US enterprise market.

Interscan Messaging Hosted Service (IMHS) is an email scanning service which cleans email traffic of spam and malware.

Secure Site, released six months ago, protects customers' websites from malware attacks.
Worry-free Remote Manager is a tool for resellers to manage and protect the networks of their customers, claimed Trend Micro.

Companies in the enterprise and midmarket are already using the services, said Patnaik.
Larger companies have a bunch of security professionals who "know the cloud is real, how it works and that the data centres are behind it", said Patnaik.

Patnaik estimated that just over a quarter of Trend Micro's resellers in Australia are recommending IMHS, which operates similarly to Symantec's MessageLabs service.