Q&A: Check Point CEO Gil Shwed

Tell us about recent product launches Check Point has made.

At the beginning of the year, we made a very important architectural improvement. We introduced a new architecture called the Software Blades. And that's a whole new architecture for building security that allows an organization of any size to basically put together the right building blocks for their security. You can have a blade of a firewall, blade of the virtual private networking, add to it the blade of a URL filtering or antivirus or intrusion prevention -- basically a customer can customize a system at any size at any need, at any speed, and also retain the full flexibility of expanding that system in the future.

We announced that at the beginning of the year. We're starting to get deployments, but I think it's quite revolutionary in the way people will deploy security in the future.

Does the Software Blades architecture allow Check Point to scale down to SMB or midmarket?

It does allow us to scale down and up basically. We have a lot of customers that are SMBs -- more than 10 percent of our customers are less than 100 people, so that allows us to scale to them. It allows us to scale to people of really any size. Often with the small customers, they would like to get one box that does it all and get a collection of multiple blades. Large customers in many cases would like to separate functionality and have one function on a single device. At the same time, large customers also like the approach of putting comprehensive solutions in branch offices or remote locations. So that's why we think this architecture will help customers of all sizes.

SMBs tend to like one device with multiple functionalities. But in this economy, are more enterprise companies gravitating toward consolidated suites?

Definitely. They are trying to consolidate a number of vendors. Clearly there are way too many security vendors today. Some have great ideas, but it's not that any particular vendor doesn't have a good value proposition or good technology. It's just that there are too many.

Customers are looking to reduce the complexity, reduce the budget and to cut back on the number of suppliers that they have, and the number of solutions, and our Software Blades architecture should help them do exactly that without sacrificing anything. Let's say a customer had a firewall team and I had an IPS team. We can tell him that he can put the intrusion-prevention blade into the firewall. [Customers] are much more excited and interested in that than they've been in the past because of the value proposition. It's not just the purchasing cost, it's also the operational cost of managing two devices, two vendors and two everything.

Check Point is an enterprise firewall company. But does Check Point have any plans to expand SMB focus? If so, what is your strategy?

We do, but at the moment there is no big initiative. We are developing new products in different areas of the market. At the beginning of the year we came out with a model that was less than $4,000 with full enterprise capabilities but for a much more modest price. Over time we'll have more and more products at all levels of the market.

If the customer says, 'I want cheap security,' we'll say, 'You'll have to use something else. If you want good security we will give you Check Point.' We can do both. We can give you high quality security at different price points. Some of it is finding new channels -- the right channels -- some of it is even addressing the right issues with our existing channels.

Is cost one of the biggest impediments for SMBs in acquiring security?

The cost, yes, but again, remember, we have such a variety of products that cost, it's not whether we cost high or low, it's what solution is the customer being offered? That's the big issue.

We have a $4,000 solution and we have a $25,000 solution. It's a question of positioning and right-sizing the solution to the market, to the customer requirements.

Next: What's Check Point Doing To Stay Ahead Of The Pack?