After more than a year of financial troubles, Secure Computing Corp is back on its feet with a suite of products that it claims will make it the number one vendor in the security market place. The San Jose, California-based company reckons its portfolio of products offers enterprises a complete, end-to-end security solution that other vendors, notably rivals Check Point Software Technologies Ltd and Security Dynamics, can’t offer. Speaking to ComputerWire yesterday, the company’s chairman and CEO, Jeff Waxman said Secure Networks was uniquely positioned to dominate the security market. He said the company had spent 1997 rebuilding its infrastructure (after three simultaneous acquisitions in 1995 left it in disarray), making its product sets work together and cleaning up its act. With those goals accomplished, Waxman said Secure Networks was now ready to come out and talk about its strategy and future direction. We know we made mistakes in the past but now we’re back on track and we want to shout about what we can deliver. Waxman’s bold comments come one month after Secure Computing turned in its first profitable quarter in seven quarters. The company managed to bring in $1m net profit for its second quarter from losses last time of $1.2m. The figures even included a $7.8m charge for restructuring in the first quarter. And Waxman predicts its uphill from here. With enterprises increasingly demanding end-to-end security solutions, he says Network Solutions is the only company that can offer a full complement of products (firewalls, authentication servers and web access products) to address their needs. As the market gets more and more competitive, companies like Check Point and Security Dynamics will have difficulty competing if they only have point solutions to offer, he said, they’ll have to develop enterprise-wide solutions and that will take time. But we’ve done that, and we’re there already. He added that the company was also working on bringing all its products under one, policy-based management platform. The latter allows administrators to manage all aspects of security (access, authentication and so on) for groups of users or whole departments, rather than doing it separately for each individual, as was the case in the past. Waxman said this was another example of where Network Computing was clearly ahead of its competitors. Greg Smith, Check Point’s product marketing manager denied the company didn’t offer an end- to-end security solution, saying Check Point’s Firewall 1 product was a whole suite of enterprise security applications. He added that the company also offered the broadest range of security tools via its OPSEC (Open Platform for Security Enterprise Connectivity) alliances. He added, We believe in giving the customer a choice, not walking them into a proprietary solution. That’s why we’ve continued to grow our market share at the expense of companies like Secure Computing.
