Faritec predicts big things for its managed security services (MSS) offering, which it launched with Symantec last week.
The service is expected to earn R25 million in recurring annuity income in the first year, and approximately R170 million a year by 2006 - capturing a 30% share of the potential R568 million market.
Gordon Love, director of security services at Faritec, says the company made the transformation to a services focus four years ago. It currently earns 65% of its revenue from managed services like application service provision, which includes managed healthcare admin and managed business intelligence services, and now the fledgling MSS. It invested R8 million in a security operations centre (SOC) for its MSS offering.
Quick on the uptake
The SA take-up of MSS is proving to be rapid, says Love, citing but not naming early adopters in the oil and gas, retail and managed healthcare provider industries. Symantec has said its own MSS offering has attracted 600 customers.
"You`d expect financial services also to be early adopters, and in a sense they are, but our MSS client prospects in that arena are taking a carefully considered approach. Each customer must decide whether protection of their information is core to their business, or whether it must be outsourced."
Love says the customer`s options can include sale and leaseback of equipment, "renting" the service with no capex, or a three-month proof-of-concept agreement. "We`ve had a 100% customer-conversion rate with the latter option," he adds.
The MSS offering consists of on-site or remote deployment of direct monitoring agents on security devices and applications (firewalls, anti-virus programs and the like), a secure connection to Faritec`s SOC, and services around it (monitoring, normalisation, analysis and more). The SOC is linked to Symantec`s own centres, for global intelligence on security threats as they occur.
Faritec also has product-centric offerings in its partnerships with IBM and Microsoft, but Love says the MSS service runs platform-agnostically.
Local outlook
BMI-TechKnowledge has predicted that the MSS market in SA will grow to R568 million in 2006. Love says Faritec will aim for a R170 million share of that.
Faritec`s full-year results for the year ending in June this year are due out today. Its last half-year results for the six months ending in December last year showed R125.6 million in revenue, slightly less than half its previous full-year revenue of R304.4 million.
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