What IT Wants From The Next White House

DAVE ROBERTS Bio: VP of sales & channel for the Americas, Websense. San Diego, Calif. Endorsing: Declined to state The Skinny: Roberts, formerly an employee of Microsoft, agrees with his former boss Bill Gates that the cap on H-1B visas for technology workers needs to be raised. In the IT security arena his current company works in, he argues that the rapid commercialization of malware needs to be addressed.

WHAT HE WANTS FROM THE NEXT PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION:

I think one of the biggest issues we've got is this limitation on visas. I worked at Microsoft a long time and I can remember Bill Gates standing in front of Congress and saying, if you put a limit on visas for IT workers, you're creating a model for outsourcing. We are a little company and we now have 250 people in Beijing. And when I think of having 150,000 visas a year coming into the market, big companies like Microsoft and Symantec, they just swamp us. We need the capability to have more jobs here in the United States, and they need to expand the ability to get visas to IT workers and developers. That's kind of my big issue.

On security, threats will continue on the Web, they're getting more and more sophisticated. I think it's a commercial issue now and people are doing it for money now, it's not just malicious. And data leakage will continue to be a big issue.

Next: Nancy Ramsey