“We see India's SMB security gap as a major growth opportunity for partners,” say SonicWall CRO and VP APJ

The company is focusing its India channel strategy on mid-market, SMB and micro-SMB customers, where it sees gaps in security skills and resources creating opportunities for partners to move beyond product sales.

SonicWall sees India's mid-market, SMB, and micro-SMB segments as one of the biggest opportunities for its channel partners, arguing that the customer base remains underserved despite growing cybersecurity risks.

The company's partner strategy is deliberately focused on customers that often lack dedicated security teams, internal expertise and the resources available to larger enterprises, Patrick O'Donnell, CRO, SonicWall, and Debasish Mukherjee, SonicWall's VP APJ Sales, told CRN India on the sidelines of the SonicWall CXO Club 2026 event in Chandigarh.

Mukherjee said SonicWall is primarily focused on the SMB segment rather than competing for the same large-enterprise opportunities as some larger cybersecurity vendors.

“The magnitude and scale of this SMB market is much higher than the enterprise, and it is often ignored globally,” he said.

That focus is also shaping how SonicWall wants its partners to approach the market. Rather than organising its strategy around specific industries, the company is segmenting the opportunity largely by customer size.

Mukherjee said cybersecurity remains a challenge across sectors including government, manufacturing and healthcare, but SonicWall does not want to restrict its channel strategy to particular verticals.

“For us, basically, we don't segregate by vertical because cybersecurity is a pain point for everyone,” he said.

The company instead sees the mid-market, SMB and micro-SMB segments as the larger opportunity because many of these customers do not have the internal resources to manage cybersecurity at the level of larger enterprises.

Security gaps create an advisory opportunity

The gap, according to SonicWall, is not necessarily just about how much customers are willing to spend on security. It is also about skills and understanding.

Mukherjee said mid-market customers often have investments in security technologies but lack the expertise to understand whether those investments are actually protecting their environments.

He pointed to what he described as basic security-hygiene mistakes, including the assumption that using a VPN or firewall automatically means an organisation is secure.

“Whatever we have implemented is working, right? That's not necessarily true,” he said.

“We are using a VPN, so we are safe. We are using a firewall, so we are safe. Actually, we are not.”

That creates a larger role for partners beyond simply supplying security products. SonicWall wants partners serving these customers to help identify risks, explain security gaps and guide customers on the fundamentals of protection.

O'Donnell said partners serving the SMB and mid-market segment need to focus on consulting with customers and helping them understand their actual exposure.

“They have to teach their customers how to protect themselves better by following the fundamentals,” he said.

Those fundamentals include controlling access, patching, using multi-factor authentication and moving SSL VPNs into more secure environments and infrastructure.

“It's not always a case of just selling products and stocking up on products. It's about doing the basics right,” O'Donnell said.

That changes the nature of the partner opportunity. SonicWall is effectively positioning partners as the security advisers for customers that may not have a CISO, a dedicated security team or even a full-time IT team.

O'Donnell said many companies in the segment SonicWall serves are under-resourced and may have only part-time IT support.

“The partners that serve those customers, first and foremost, need to be focused on what we're focused on, which is making sure they're consulting with those customers,” he said.

The company also sees a communication gap that partners can help address. O'Donnell said security risks need to be translated into business language that senior executives can understand rather than being presented purely through technical terminology.

That was also a focus of SonicWall's Protect Report, which the company used to highlight what O'Donnell described as “false confidence” among some mid-market organisations.

“Part of our job is also to educate our partners, customers, potential customers and prospects about the real threats, but not in technical lingo or language,” he said.

“We need to communicate in business language that a businessperson, CEO or COO can understand and then take action.”

Skills gap affects partners too

The opportunity, however, comes with a challenge for the channel itself. Partners serving the same customers are also dealing with shortages of the skills required to deliver increasingly sophisticated security services.

Mukherjee said both customers and partners are facing skill gaps, including challenges around retaining the right talent.

That is pushing SonicWall towards a platform-led approach in which partners can begin delivering services without having to build every capability and infrastructure component themselves from day one.

“If they have to get into an MSP model, they need the right skills. They need to have 24x7 operations,” Mukherjee said.

Instead of requiring partners to immediately scale their own infrastructure, SonicWall wants them to use its technology, platform and resources while building their own capabilities.

“You develop our technology, our platform, our resources and start offering. In the meantime, you start growing and developing your skills through our offerings,” he said.

O'Donnell sees another operational problem among existing MSPs and MSSPs: tool sprawl.

He said many service providers have invested in multiple tools and capabilities to the point where managing them has itself become a burden, while also increasing operating costs.

“They have too many tools, and managing so many tools is becoming burdensome to them,” O'Donnell said.

For SonicWall, that creates an opportunity to position unified management and AI investments around a simpler operating model for partners.

The company wants its platform to help partners scale protection without requiring them to continually add staff or increase operational costs.

That becomes particularly important as partners increasingly operate around monthly recurring revenue models.

“If you're an MSP, you live in a monthly recurring revenue model framework,” O'Donnell said.

“We have to be able to support that MRR model.”

India investment supports broader security portfolio

SonicWall's growing investment in India is also tied to this strategy, with the company planning to add 400 engineering roles as it expands one of its largest global development centres in the country.

O'Donnell said India already has a strong SonicWall engineering and threat-research presence, making the investment an expansion of capabilities that are already being developed locally.

The company sees access to engineering and AI talent as particularly important as AI becomes more central to cybersecurity.

“AI is the foundation of how we're going to increasingly focus on delivering outcomes to customers, not just selling products but delivering outcomes,” O'Donnell said.

SonicWall already has a threat-research team in India and plans to expand those capabilities alongside its engineering and AI resources.

For the channel, the broader product strategy also creates opportunities beyond the company's traditional network-security business.

O'Donnell said SonicWall is increasingly investing in zero trust, endpoint security and cloud-based management alongside its core network-security portfolio.

The company recently announced a new endpoint security product aimed at the same customer segment.

“SonicWall is famous for network security. That is our bread and butter and our flagship offering,” O'Donnell said.

“But, as a cybersecurity company, we are investing in other surrounding technologies and capabilities that help deliver those outcomes.”

For partners, that expands the potential opportunity beyond firewall transactions into a broader set of security technologies and services.

The underlying strategy remains focused on the same customer base: organisations that need stronger security outcomes but may not have the internal skills, resources or infrastructure to deliver them on their own.

That leaves partners with a growing role in bridging the gap between the technology these customers already have and the security outcomes they are trying to achieve.