The assessment comes from Brenton Smith, Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, for Geography Symantec Cloud at the recent Symantec Vision 2011. According to him, Vietnam is one of the faster growing markets, and they will continue to invest here beyond what they already have done in the region. Giang Tu reports.
You mentioned the target of US$1 billion to be achieved in five years, could you talk about it and how it can be reached?
I have made that statement. You know I said to some Wall Street people that 15 percent of our total revenue will come from the cloud in the next five years. Their response was: what do you mean by that? What’s going to happen? I just tried to tell them how important the cloud is; it’s going to be 15 percent of our business. We’re at US$700 billion today and that’s going to keep growing very rapidly. On our cloud businesses today, not the consumer side, but enterprise only, we’ve exceeded US$700 billion. The consumer side is hard to quantify, because more than 80 percent of our consumer business now comes through ESD and electronic channels, but on the enterprise side it’s about US$700 billion, and I expect that to grow.
It may be difficult for your partners to integrate your products and sell them together, both hosted and on-premise versions of products together. How does Symantec work on this with your general partners in Southeast Asia?
We want customers to make the decision. Our goal is that a partner can go in and select. If they’re selling on-premise or hosted product versions, we want them to be comfortable selling that. We’re going to enable them, train them, and then leave the choice to the customer. Unlike our competitors who can only offer one or the other, we think we’re uniquely positioned to give the customer choice. Our partners need to be trained, and I’m confident that our partners will do very well working with Symantec. I tell partners all the time: If you invest with Symantec you won’t need to worry, because we’ll continue to extend our portfolio, we’ll stay ahead of the major trends, and I’ve made a commitment that every year I’m CEO, that our partners will be a larger percent of our total revenue. So far I’ve been doing this for two years and that’s been the case, and I expect that to continue.
How does Symantec expect to perform in the Vietnam market?
Vietnam is an emerging market right now, you’ve got a situation where people are looking for access to power, and Vietnam has a lot of talent. People are asking, can we locate engineering capabilities and other capabilities in Vietnam, so what we’re seeing is a very rapid growth. It is one of the faster growing economies in Asia right now, and so for us, our role is to grow faster than GDP. Because we think technology is where there is more adoption. As we look at it, throughout this region GDP growths are ahead of the rest of the world. And Vietnam specifically is one of the higher growing markets for us, and so we will continue to invest. I just had a message from my CFO who is doing some analysis on finding the biggest opportunities for next year’s planning. Markets like Indonesia and Vietnam are new markets for us, beyond what we’ve already done in the region, like China and India, so we see a lot of opportunity.
Vietnamese
