Strategy
Geographies
Stonesoft corporate headquarters are located in Finland. The company has four main market areas: Americas (USA; Canada, Mexico and Brazil), Europe (Nordic countries, Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, France, Benelux), Emerging Markets (Russia, North Africa and Middle East) and APAC (Thailand, India and China).
The company has a global go-to-market model for the sales and marketing, support and training offerings. The sales and marketing organization relies on local resources to support and adapt to the local market maturity and conditions. Stonesoft local resources are working in close co-operation with channel partners.
Stonesoft focuses on enterprise customers who often have wide geographical reach. To be able to
support these customers, Stonesoft has an extensive partner network. Stonesoft has both local
partnerships to support local needs and regional and global partnerships with leading organizations
like Siemens Business Services, Fujitsu Services and IBM Global Services.
The country organizations are supported by the global support services, available 24/7,
depending on the customers' SLAs. In addition, Stonesoft has second-line support services available
for the channel partners to further enhance their support offerings.
Stonesoft training services operate according to a two-layer model, where Stonesoft provides training services, and Stonesoft Authorized Training Sites are responsible for initiating training services for customers.
Messaging
Stonesoft marketing strategy integrates both marketing and communications strategy. The marketing strategy is built on identifying and understanding the meaning metrics of the key stakeholders; customers, channel partners, investors, media, analysts, potential employees and society.
The main customer focus is on the enterprise customers, who have a geographically distributed organization with a great need for business continuity and security due to high transaction volume or value or due to compliance requirements. These customers typically faces business initiated security challenges as they use e-services extensively as a part of their daily operations.
The customer messaging has been split into two categories: technical decision makers and business decision makers. The content of our messaging differs according to the intended audience to meet their specific expectations. Stonesoft currently has industry specific messaging for the following industry verticals: finance, public administration, retail, health care, and legal services. These industry segments are also in line with the coverage model of the sales organization.
With more than a decade of experience, Stonesoft provides real life solutions that are designed to solve customers’ network security and business challenges.
Operational Excellence
Stonesoft StoneGate is designed for organizations who need solutions for both network
security and service availability, and for whom the combination of multiple security and
availability solutions is too complex and too cumbersome to manage.
StoneGate is a platform that enables adaptive security and business continuity through secure
and continuous business communication over the Internet while simplifying the infrastructure.
The StoneGate solution unifies FW, VPN, IPS, load balancing, and high availability. Unified and centralized management creates simplicity to complexity with better visibility on the network traffic. This enables faster reaction time for the administrators as it empowers them with clarity of status.
Empowering the Business
Stonesoft´s StoneGate security platform enables resource optimization. This is not limited to
human resources (OPEX related), but includes investments in tangible assets as well (CAPEX).
Unified manageability and remote, fail-safe upgrades with Multi-Link and Multi-Link VPN technologies enable cost efficiency and business support.
StoneGate provides a unified network security architecture with high availability allowing the
customer to have "always on" access to business-critical applications and data.
Centralized manageability lowers customers’ administrative costs and reaction times and improves
security levels – while supporting the customer’s decision-making with advanced monitoring,
analyzing and reporting.
Unified management offers flexible scalability that supports changing business needs. The StoneGate solution creates an opportunity to reduce downtime and gain higher performance.
Customer Channels Engagement
Stonesoft sales strategy is built on Stonesoft Direct Touch Sales organization and cooperation
with Stonesoft channel partners. Stonesoft Direct Touch Sales organization executes the following
stages in the sales process at the end-user: demand and budget generation, consulting, technical
positioning, and piloting. These are usually the most challenging phases in the sales process, and
therefore Stonesoft focuses on these stages to ensure a successful outcome.
The Direct Touch Sales organization is backed up with technical pre-sales engineers to ensure that the customer expectations for the solution are met. All the phases in the sales cycle are transparently monitored by the management with a sales force automation tool that enables pipeline management, forecasting, customer relationship management, and sales force activity management. The tool is also used to focus and align the marketing & PR actions to the target customers.
The Direct Touch Sales organization is also playing a vital role in the product development process by listening to the customer and sharing the customers’ voice with the product management and rest of the organization. This practice is a fundamental part in developing the solutions to the direction that helps the customers to solve their existing and future business challenges.
Stonesoft channel partners are engaged in the sales process at the time when the offer to the customer is made. The partner builds the offer to the customer, backed up by Stonesoft when needed. The partner handles the delivery of goods and value added -services, the training the end-user to administer the solution, and taking care of the support and maintenance over the ownership period. When the solution needs to be migrated to a new one, the sales cycle starts again, but now in a joint effort with the partner.
Support and maintenance services to the end-user are provided according to a two-layer model, where the first line support services are provided by Stonesoft channel partners and backed up by Stonesoft Support services, which are available 24/7 depending on the SLAs.
Stonesoft is committed to turning our partnerships into mutual successes. We are committed to conducting business with a limited number of selected, certified channel partners worldwide. This commitment is fundamental to our long term Global Stonesoft Corporate Strategy, where one of the key values is to be able to maintain sustainable and predictable co-operation with the certified channel partners.
Stonesoft values long-term strategic partnerships with partners to jointly deliver significant
value to customers, not just maintaining a traditional product resell channel. We aim to keep our
partnership model simple, therefore minimizing costs of becoming a Stonesoft Partner and
maintaining the partner status.
Stonesoft offers partners a straightforward channel assignment program to generate value to their customers as quickly as possible. The categorized channel program with a limited number of selected partners provides excellent opportunities for differentiating the enterprise security market, for conducting profitable business, and providing added value to the customers.
Innovations
Stonesoft places a strong emphasis on innovative research and development and on protecting its inventions. The focus is on developing both new and existing high-availability network security solutions. Stonesoft has been an innovative player in the network security market since the introduction of the StoneBeat high-availability solution in 1996.Stonesoft was the first company to provide firewall/VPN high-availability solutions, firewall/VPN clustering solutions, ISP multi-homing solutions and Multi-Link VPN solutions.
Stonesoft has a strong patent portfolio with 20 granted patents in the US and 18 in Europe and nearly 20 patent applications pending.
The patent portfolio contains, for example, a patent called "Data Transmission Control Method" (patent number 6,912,200), which covers the VPN component of the Multi-Link functionality and the connection selection method where both ends of the communication are protected by the StoneGate platform. The patented solution is unique because of the method used to select the connections and the ability to determine a quality factor for each. The quality factor sends information between the sites to ensure the fastest and most reliable combinations of connections. The patented technology overcomes availability and latency issues in the Internet and ensures transparent and fault-tolerant VPN tunnels. Data flow is never interrupted by lost connections between the firewall and outside networks and overall bandwidth is increased compared to networks using a single provider.
Customer Experience
The Stonesoft support program consists of support, software maintenance and hardware replacement service. There are two service levels for the support - Premium Support and Basic Support.Support services are provided globally 24/7. The first-line support can be purchased either from a Stonesoft channel partner or directly from Stonesoft. Stonesoft has two support centers, one in Helsinki, Finland and one in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Our aim is to provide quality service to our customers, and all the people taking calls in our support centers have a strong technical background.
Hardware replacement service guarantees to the customers that if they experience problems with their appliances, Stonesoft will send a replacement unit as soon as possible. The hardware replacement service is available up to 39 months after the purchase of an appliance.
When the customer chooses premium support, support services are available 24/7 with a two-hour response time. In case of basic support, response time is next business day and the service hours are 8-5.
StoneGate Management Center forms the core of the StoneGate Platform, providing unified management for StoneGate Firewall, VPN and IPS solutions. When it comes to security, corporations are often forced either to use different management tools for each security product, or to sacrifice manageability and use so-called "unified management" for systems that were not initially designed to be managed together. The result is inefficiency, higher costs for training and an overall decrease in security due to the administrator's inability to effectively manage the security environment. In contrast, StoneGate products have been designed to fully benefit from a unified management system.
One of the StoneGate design principles has always been to create a robust product that meets the real life challenges of demanding environments. As such, StoneGate has always been an excellent choice for securing large network installations. StoneGate includes a vast set of innovative functionalities that reduce the costs of managing and maintaining distributed environments.