LANDesk bets on midsize market to achieve AP growth
And it is aiming to do so by enabling businesses to implement enterprise-class system management suites without the installation hassles that typically come with such products, according to Joe Wang, LANDesk's president and CEO.
The system configuration and security management company was founded in 1985, acquired by Intel in 1991 and spun off in 2002, during which Wang took on the role of CEO after leaving Symantec.
LANDesk currently has offices in Australia, China, Japan, and Singapore, and is in the process of hiring at least one more sales engineer each in Singapore, Indonesia, India and Malaysia. Its customers in the region include PricewaterhouseCoopers, the InterContinental Hotel chain, Singapore-based transport company Comfort Delgro, and Japanese bank Tokyo-Mitsubishi. Its global customers include Yahoo!, T-Mobile, Coca-Cola and the U.S. Army.
"The Asia-Pacific market is not as mature (as the United States)… many companies are not using management solutions to manage IT, and there's a lot of opportunity (for LANDesk) here," Wang told ZDNet Asia.
There are many medium-sized companies in the Asia-Pacific region, he noted, adding that he expects LANDesk to grow 50 percent year-on-year in this region. This market currently contributes about 22 percent of the organization's worldwide revenues, which he declined to divulge as the company is preparing to be publicly listed on an undisclosed date.
Wang is betting on customers to take up LANDesk's offer that its products will help them manage and secure their company desktops, servers and mobile devices, without the installation hassles that typically come with popular enterprise-class system management suites.
System management offerings such as Computer Associates Unicenter, Hewlett-Packard OpenView and IBM Tivoli are akin to "frameworks" that manage everything from front-end clients, to back-end data centers and storage area networks, he explained. As a result, they could be too cumbersome for the mid-tier company to implement, he said.
Such managements suites could take up to 18 months to deploy across the organization, he added, noting that in comparison, "our products take only a couple of weeks to deploy".
This is because LANDesk's management software suite, which encompasses automated software distribution, hardware and software inventory management, security patch management, and operating system migration, focuses only on the front-end, Wang said. "We're easy to use, and we're quick (to install)," he said.
LANDesk is targeting companies that require 1,000 to 6,000 user-licenses. Such companies--considered midsize in the United States--make up more than 50 percent of LANDesk's clients, and this market segment marks the "sweet spot" for the company, he said. Framework vendors typically sell to organizations with more than 10,000 nodes, he added.