Walter Brambilla: Milan native, born in 1965, joined Norman on July 1st, 2005 as Sales Manager for Italy. Brambilla began his career at Italtel in 1986 as a C programmer in a UNIX environment, an experience that led him to roles as an analyst and later as a UNIX system administrator at the ENI group. After over 8 years as a freelancer at the Publicitas group, where he gained significant experience in the world of relational databases, he joined SCO Italia, initially in a presales role and later as Product Marketing Manager for Italy and Southern Europe. Leveraging his strong interpersonal skills, he then started focusing on roles increasingly characterized by external relations: Alliance Manager for the Italia OnLine / Infostrada portal and Channel Development Manager at Sun Microsystems Italia. Thanks to these positions, he further deepened his understanding of indirect channel management mechanisms, both in terms of sales and especially in establishing successful partnerships. The desire to take on new professional experiences led him to leave Sun in October 2003 and join I-Ter, where he held the dual role of Channel Manager and Area Sales Manager for Northern Italy for CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) products.
How does the Italian market present itself and what are the prospects?I believe that the Italian market is generally recovering, and fortunately this recovery also concerns the IT sector and more specifically the aspects related to the security of information systems. There is interest in examining new proposals, but also a lot of caution in making decisions, which inevitably translates into a lengthening of the sales cycle. The prospects are still good also because threats are constantly increasing both in number and in terms of sophistication and possible damage to companies, so countermeasures, and the investments to implement them, must proceed hand in hand.What relationship do consumers have with this market?I don’t think it’s possible to give a single answer to this question as there are different types of consumers with substantial differences both in terms of perception of necessity and possible opportunities. Norman’s typical market target is SMEs, and the relationship of this type of companies with IT security is quite good: there is awareness of the risks incurred by not protecting oneself adequately and also a willingness to listen to advice from qualified interlocutors, who in our case are certified partners, often already trust advisors of end customers and therefore with very good relationships. As for large users, the matter is more complex because it falls within much broader plans and projects often carried out by large system integrators who manage the entire company infrastructure, so it is difficult to extract only the part relating to security. Certainly issues like spamming or spyware have now impacted even organizations that until recently thought they could isolate the problem with more or less improvised solutions and instead now find themselves having to deal with it in a much more serious and structured way as it causes loss of productivity, image, sensitive data, etc…What is Norman’s vision?Our Vision is that, despite the enormous crowding in this sector in terms of players and solutions available on the market, there is still the possibility to work well and carve out one’s own space in the most suitable market sector based on the company’s characteristics and the solutions offered. On one hand, there are the usual big names in terms of partners and final customers, but on the other hand it is established that there is a myriad of small and medium companies that need a completely different kind of relationship with their suppliers and are therefore much more willing to work with those they perceive as closer to them in the way they operate. Norman is definitely among these, as demonstrated by the appreciative feedback we receive almost daily.Who is your typical customer?If by typical customer we mean the end user, certainly the type of company we mostly address belongs to the small and medium enterprise segment and is absolutely cross-market. We reach the consumer market, in fact, only through single licenses purchasable via the Web and for the moment we do not intend to attack the retail market nor focus particularly on large customers. We keep in mind that Norman sells exclusively through its own indirect channel, so our ideal customers are actually our partners, which can be small system integrators, software houses, software resellers, etc. Some distinctions must then be made in terms of solutions offered: for antivirus and antispyware, the reference market is the one mentioned above, whereas antispam solutions, in all their forms (software, appliance, hosted services) actually target higher-level partners and customers.Who are your competitors?We could count them by the dozens, and the names are those we all know. Norman is a brand known and appreciated by industry operators, but it is not yet very visible on the actual market, so our main difficulty when it comes to acquiring new partners/customers is precisely convincing them to try a product that at first glance seems to be just one among many. We fight on one side against competitors with high-profile names, much more present than us in the market and media, with whom we have no problems competing technologically, but where we certainly suffer from fewer references and marketing efforts. On the other hand, but this is true only for home users or single users, competitors are mostly companies from Eastern Europe who bet everything on price, so on this target it is often hard to compete, even though unlike them we can boast a sales channel and especially localized technical support. Fortunately, more than 90% of those who try our solutions eventually choose them, and this, combined with the very high renewal rate (95%), allows us to have continuous growth and good expectations for the coming years.What does Norman offer more compared to competitors present in Italy, why choose you?Contrary to what might be inferred from the previous answers, there are many reasons why it is worth choosing Norman. First of all, technologically, we are still the only ones boasting the use of Norman Sandbox, a proprietary technology that proactively identifies even viruses not yet catalogued in definition files. Unlike the heuristic methods used by our competitors, which are based on checklists, assumptions and statistics, Sandbox creates a virtual environment where various files are executed to see how they behave. The suspicious file is then led to believe it has bypassed all defenses, and its behavior is what it would be if truly executed on our PC. This has two huge advantages: first, greater protection because the malicious code never actually accesses the system; second, the number of false alarms drastically decreases, which in terms of time and resources (and thus money), are no less costly than managing real infections. The high quality of Sandbox and NVC (Norman Virus Control) is also evidenced by the number of 100% Awards received from Virus Bulletin and other third-party organizations that test various products. Other obvious advantages for the end user are the low system resource requirements and the extreme ease of management, which make our products usable even on not very recent systems in terms of operating system version (we still support Windows 95!) and with low CPU and memory availability. For partners, the advantages are even more evident and numerous: first, Norman sells only through them, so they never risk being bypassed by the vendor nor compared with products available at large retail. Then, certainly, there is the issue of margins, which Norman keeps very high and unchanged both for new licenses and renewals. Points such as free licenses for internal use, possibility of demo installations, training, etc., we consider given, but if I had to name the main reasons why we are preferred over others, I would certainly mention the ease of relationship with us combined with the speed of technical-commercial responses and the flexibility in managing any pre- and post-sales situation. Unlike our big competitors who mainly sell directly and to large clients, for us contact with the field even for small deals is the most important part of our work, so we follow our partners and their customers practically every day.What are the sector’s novelties?More than actual new releases, I would say we witness continuous updates and improvements of what already exists on the market. The trend is to have increasingly integrated complex solutions, sometimes appreciated for having fewer suppliers/interlocutors, other times less so because not everyone wants to rely on a single brand regarding security. So we see a multiplication of more or less equivalent solutions that, upon closer analysis, reveal that some fundamental components are actually the result of partnerships, which means not having in-house intellectual property and the skills needed to directly support product evolution.How was the last year and what are your future goals?Fortunately this year went very well: although it was the first with a direct presence of Norman in Italy, we saw a doubling both in terms of turnover and number of resellers, and, for just over a month, also a new person on board with channel manager duties. The goals can therefore only be to continue having very high growth rates and to increase both brand visibility and our presence in projects and customers so far little pursued. All this, always and in any case with a particular focus on our partners, who have always represented our only sales channel and on which we place great emphasis.
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