What portion of your revenue comes from SaaS offerings? How do you expect it to grow?

Globally, our SaaS business constitutes 5-10 percent of our revenue. We expect this to grow to 10-15 percent in the next couple of years. IDC has predicted a growth of 27 percent in the Security-as-a-Service (SaaS) market over the next five years, so we also expect similar growth in our SaaS revenue. The on-premise market is growing at roughly 10 percent. Thus, the SaaS market is growing three times faster than on-premise, offering opportunity for our partners and us.

How are you taking SaaS to the market? How do partners benefit from this offering?

A recent report released by Zinnov Consultancy states that cloud services in India will be worth $1 billion by 2015, while an IDC survey reveals that 87.5 percent of users surveyed cited security concerns as the primary issue in adopting cloud-based services. McAfee plans to leverage its comprehensive SaaS portfolio of cloud-based security services along with its global threat intelligence network to help make the broader cloud computing ecosystem more safe and secure. As in the case of our other products, we will be using channel routes to bring this product to the market, and will therefore look at adding a few channel partners in the near future. Partners will be entitled to similar margins and benefits from McAfee.

 Options include public clouds and external private clouds. Here's how to choose wisely.

One of the biggest decisions IT managers have to make is how and where to run data center applications. Fortunately, there are multiple choices that lower costs and increase business agility, including server virtualization, internal clouds, public clouds and external private clouds.

Many IT organizations are taking advantage of these options. Server virtualization is currently being used by more than 70% of enterprises to reduce costs, and cloud computing is being used or planned for use by more than 10% of corporations, according to Antonio Piraino, research director at Tier1 Research.