Bu 486 – Case Study: F-Secure CorporationBU 486 MIS ProjectsCase Study One Evaluation: F-Secure CorporationDue: February 17, 2011Instructions:Answer each of the questions below. Be sure to leave the question in its place and type your response below each question. Please think critically about each question and be specific about each response. To fully develop a response to each question, I would feel as though it would take at a bare minimum one solid paragraph (if not more) for each question.
Upon completing the case study evaluation, save the file with the name: firstname_lastname_case_study_two.doc. For instance, if your name was John Doe, you would save your file as john_doe_case_study_two.doc. Upload and submit your file in Blackboard.
Your responses will be graded according to the rubric provided under the rubric link in Blackboard.Questions:1. F-Secure created an innovative way to distribute security solution and claim market share in a crowded market. In your own words, thoughtfully consider F-Secures strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
StrengthsWell-established brand nameContracts with over 170 ISP partners, which are difficult for the ISPs to move away fromInnovative Research and Development teamProvide securitys as the customer needs them and not as one whole setWeaknessesMarket growth dependent on new ISPs with current business modelMajor portions of security market not approachedLack of Retail marketOpportunitiesNew ISP MarketsMore consumer-based marketing, which would not be dependent on ISPsDevelopment of securities in the newest mobile marketsThreatsOther security companiesGlobal technology market changing to more mobile enterpriseStaleness of ISP markets.2. In your own words, compare and contrast F-Secures distribution model and the model utilized by more established companies like McAfee and Symantec. Why did F-Secure have such problems gaining a foothold when using traditional means of distribution? How exactly does F-Secures distribution model fit in the whole
The goal of F-Secure is to help the business end users, but to do so, we need to differentiate our business model from other competitors. Many of the financial services companies and startups do not invest in an established provider of services in the market, and because of this, F-Secure and many other startup providers are difficult to choose from. They do have major challenges due to our centralized system design and the need for an efficient source of financial services and they have an overall product focused more on a product designed with the customer in mind. As a result, our platform has a high degree of uncertainty, and we are seeing some of its problems. It is not easy to understand our business, but we could be wrong. We just need to understand what it takes to keep this system focused and in development.
To begin, F-Secure doesn’t make things difficult, it forces the application to adapt, it makes it a one-stop shop for those in need for financial services. While that may not be quite as hard as it sounds, the implementation itself, by its nature, is hard to scale off of.
The problem for F-Secure is that if there are a lot of users who rely on a different financial services provider then you would expect it to not work as well as it does. Most of the financial services providers that offer the services have strong business structure that prevents you from scaling off from them. As I have discussed in more depth, F-Secure would likely solve this problem for some small users by letting them choose providers with their own preferences. However, the overall idea of adding support for the community and making the business work was not what I had in mind when designing it. For that reason, we can’t see any reason why it should not be possible to scale on F-Secure in a single implementation. The more that the community integrates with financial services providers, the more we can grow. By that definition, I don’t think any other company would be willing to commit $10,000 to building a service with more than 100,000 users.
The success that a company has if you have a long-term growth trajectory is that it stays very good, and that growth doesn’t change after five years. If growth begins in the next three or four years then we can’t even start growing anymore. A company like F-Secure has such a long-term growth trajectory but is still dependent on the users for all services providers. If you take a customer with a fixed term of $10,000 a year and then you increase it to $20,000 a year to include a variety of sub markets, your growth in a few years might be much slower than before (in one year or two years the company likely would be struggling against its current market conditions).
To say more about the development behind F-Secure is too much, we don’t see any major problems with it. Even though F-Secure’s design is based around a single company with strong development and market positioning, with a variety of partners and a lot of innovation at the core, there is still only just enough space for a small group of providers who have the infrastructure to deliver a fully integrated product. However, to some extent it is because of the growth in F-Secure that it allows us not to see any significant problems. The same is not true of many of the major providers who do not see problems with F-Secure. For example, M2 and ECC are both very active in the development of F-Secure, so this can cause some difficulties for F-Secure development but also would put it at a disadvantage with many established organizations. Moreover, if our development continues