He's Got Kasperskonality

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Not many CEOs would use a T-shirt bearing their own likeness as a marketing campaign, but that's just the kind of iconic status Eugene Kaspersky has achieved.

Moscow-based security vendor Kaspersky Lab hands out T-shirts emblazoned with the face of its co-founder and CEO, on which he dons a military beret in an image recalling the classic portrait of revolutionary Che Guevara. "Viruses No Pasaran!" is spread across the bottom of the shirt in bold-faced lettering.

Choosing a T-shirt -- he epitome of low-rent fashion -- as a vehicle for Kaspersky's image provides its own sense of poetry: The man himself notoriously eschews the formal wardrobe preferred by most of his peers. Colleagues say he doesn't even own a suit. More often than not, you'll find him in blue jeans.

Kaspersky is known for his humor and joie de vivre, whether it's acting in a Chaplinesque film short that depicts him dueling black-clad rivals named "McAfee" and "Symantec," or singing and dancing on a torchlit beach during the vendor's recent channel partner conference in Puerto Rico.

"You can tell that he loves what he's doing, and he really loves security," said Todd Leidner, vice president of operations at Intelek Technologies, a Norman, Okla.-based solution provider. "You can tell how much he enjoys it by listening to him talk. You just learn so much."

In short, he's excessively approachable; he's everybody's buddy and he knows how to inspire loyalty from both employees and channel partners. He is in every way the face of the company: "There is no Mr. Symantec," he points out with a wink.

Driven largely by the force of its co-founder's idiosyncratic quirkiness -- a phenomenon one analyst describes as "Kasperskonality"-- the company has burst onto the security scene, working its way from relative obscurity to now nipping at the heels of its larger, better-known rivals.

Kaspersky Lab is ranked the No. 4 company in end-point security market share, according to research firm NPD Group, and its star is on the rise.

Having gained a strong foothold in both the consumer and SMB security spaces, the company will now focus its Kasperskonality, if you will, on the enterprise with an expanded product portfolio that will start rolling out this spring. It also plans to recruit new channel partners serving all market segments over the next year. In a market where many vendors are cutting back channel efforts under economic pressure, that's no small matter.

The enterprise push comes at a critical time. As malicious threats skyrocketed to 15 million new types in 2008, the fight against cybercrime has become an "arms race" against criminal hackers, Kaspersky said. "In these times there are more criminals, because now there are jobless engineers around the globe that will use this opportunity to get money. That means that there will be a lot of antivirus projects," Kaspersky said, sitting down for an interview with CRN at a Moscow hotel near the vendor's headquarters.

NEXT: Does the enterprise market want personality?

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