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Technology Stocks : Check Point Software (CHKP) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BOGEY MAN who wrote (1798)	3/16/1998 8:36:00 PM
From: Guy Peter Cordaro	Respond to of 7150

Check Point may be a target soon since it is the only stand alone firewall company left in the market: March 16, 1998, TechWeb News -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Larson speaks out on channel issues By Charlotte Dunlap EDITOR'S NOTE:Network Associates Inc., formed through the merger of McAfee Associates Inc. and Network General Corp., has been on a whirlwind buying spree. In particular, it has been snapping up security companies in an attempt to be a one-stop security shop. Now it is bringing its entire product offering to the channel. Bill Larson, chief executive and chairman of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, talked last week to CRN Senior Editor Charlotte Dunlap about the state of the security industry and the importance of the channel. CRN:What is the state of the security market? Bill Larson:The state of the industry will be quite different a year from now. We are at an influx point from the standpoint of vendors. We are seeing a major consolidation of vendors. A year ago, there were probably 40 viable firewall companies as independent stand-alone companies. Today there's really only one independent stand-alone firewall company, and that's CheckPoint [Software Inc.] We offer a firewall with our Trusted Information Systems transaction, and Cisco [Systems Inc.] offers a firewall. I don't think the firewall market will exist as an independent market a year from now. Instead, CIOs are telling us they want an integrated security solution that covers the five major categories:firewall, encryption, authentication, intrusion detection and antivirus, and they want it from a single vendor. CRN:What's the importance of the channel to Network Associates? Larson:Four years ago, the company [had] $20 million in revenue and we're projected to do $850 million this year. When we started we had no sales people, no channel, just electronic software distribution. We were a shareware company. People don't realize we're the third most popular Web site, after Microsoft [Corp.] and Netscape [Communications Inc.], with 75 million hits a week. We had to build our credibility as a vendor before moving into the channel. Two years ago, we had zero channel revenue. In the fourth quarter of 1997 McAfee made 50 percent of its revenue through the channel. We're now [as a combined company] making 30 percent of our revenue through the channel, and we see that moving quickly to 50 percent within a couple quarters. It's not that we've had a change of heart toward the channel, but we now have credibility as the 10th largest Internet software company in the world. The channel wants to do business with us. Young companies have to buy their way into distribution. CRN:What is the Internet platform of choice? Larson:We're riding the [Windows] NT wave. Three years ago, NT was a desktop solution and moved into the Novell [Inc.] NetWare space as a workgroup solution. Today it is a bridge between two previously discrete worlds:the network file and print services LAN world, and the Unix database and applications services WAN world. It offers the functionality of Unix at the pricing of NetWare, and it has scaled up now to being a recognized leader in the departmental space. And as Microsoft evolves NT into a true enterprise operating environment for the distributed computing of mission-critical applications, it will start to displace Unix and has started already to displace Unix at the margin as the enterprise environment of choice. CRN:Is your technology adapting to Java and ActiveX and able to recognize hostile applets? Larson:We were the first vendor to ship hostile applet protection on the client. We now offer it both on the client and the server, it's embedded in our VirusScan offering, and we have 600 hostile applets in our library today. Something like 30 percent of our corporate customers won't deploy Java on their corporate network for fear of hostile attacks, and that's why we brought that product to market.