SonicWall CEO: How To Beat Cisco

How is SonicWall is beating Cisco in the sales trenches?

When we talk to our partners and end customers, CIOs and CEOs, they clearly are looking at our technology as a differentiator. So the ability for us to provide full UTM (Unified Threat Management), Gateway, AV (Antivirus), Intrusion prevention, spyware on one common appliance, one common management system is a crtical advantage that we have. Also our reassembly-free deep packet inspection provides the users with less systems degradation than any of our competitors. The performance of our product is clearly at a leadership level.

Second to that, our channel partners just make more money selling our product. Profitability behind selling SonicWall versus Cisco is a very important part of why we are winning both with the end customer and the reseller.

Talk about the price of a full UTM solution price for a SonicWall solution versus a Cisco solution?

The ratios of two to three times more expensive to buy a Cisco product is very consistent regardless of which product you are talking about and what capacity you are buying. Whether you are buying our very top end, our E7500 Appliance and spending roughly around $25,000, you'll spend $50,000 to $75,000 for that same solution for Cisco. Or if you are only buying our $500 solution our entry level TZ product you'll still be spending close to $3,000 for the current ASA product with what they are calling UTM and it is still not even the same UTM. That is the other thing we have to be very clear about. The industry standard for UTM is gateway, AV, intrusion prevention, spyware, antivirus. And what you'll see from Cisco is you absolutely don't get those compliments of technology. Again, we are at a very compelling opportunity from a technical standpoint.

Besides the box and technical specifications, there are a couple of other reasons we continue to win with both channel partners and end customers. Customers avoid complexity and our products are just easier to install. Therefore our resellers are more productive. They are making more money on the installations. And we are just easier to manage through our global management system. I think the fact that we have got this very strong economic proposition at the box level complimenting that with the installation being seamless and easy and the management of the solution. It is a striking difference in comparison (against Cisco) as far as economics to our channel partners.

How many solution providers have you taken from the Cisco camp?

We really don't track that statistic but here is what I can tell you: our unit growth is substantial year over year. And more important than that we have added here in North America another 1,000 partners. With today's economy business starts at the VAR level are not that prevalent. But what I can tell you is we are getting conversion (from other vendors to SonicWall).

Any specific customer win that comes to mind?

We just had a very large semiconductor company in North America choose SonicWall. One of the reasons they chose our technology over Cisco is quite frankly again this whole notion of easy to use, easy to manage across a large scale network. That was in the last three months. I called on the account with the VAR and our entire sales team because of the size of this order, over $500,000.

The reasons we won the award is not just the actual price difference. It was based on the three dynamics of economics: the purchase price was less expensive, the installation was going to be less and easier to do, and long-term management was going to be much easier. They have adopted our global management system. They truly looked at total cost of ownership and we won hands down.

What was the dynamics with the CIO in that deal?

The CIO said that 70 percent of his IT budget was now being deployed to just maintenance of his existing infrastructure. Think about that. He was saying that the 30 percent remaining had to be spent extremely wisely. Given the current economic trends in North America with budgets being tightened, the CIO felt that he absolutely had to consider an alternative and that is how we got brought to the party. It was an absolute Cisco environment.

Let me give you this anecdotal comment from the CIO when he actually signed the PO (Purchase Order). He said: 'No one ever got fired for buying Cisco. But everyone's been fired for blowing their budget.'

How do you battle the Cisco fear factor with regard to if you don't use Cisco all the time your network is at risk. How do you VARs battle that?

It's a battle we fight always. I don't think it is going to go away. You have to give Cisco the credit that they deserve. They have built a long term sustainable franchise and it's enviable by all of us in the industry. But what I will tell you is that people when they consider an alternative take a deeper look and they are finding out that some of the things Cisco has implied or driven from a technology standpoint aren't necessarily what's important to their business. The flexibility a smaller vendor like SonicWall provides those customers is becoming far more meaningful.

NEXT: Why VARs Find SonicWall More Profitable Than Cisco