Checking In On Check Point

With a bit of work, visibility, and a few new partners, Check Point is poised for accelerated growth

I attended the Check Point analyst event on Monday of this week in Chicago. It’s been a while since Check Point got the analysts together so there was plenty of catching up to do.

When you meet face-to-face with Check Point, you are reminded that this is one of the biggest and most successful security vendors in the world. Check Point has now exceeded over $1 billion in revenue, nearly doubling in size since 2006. Yeah, I know what you are thinking – Given what’s gone on in the security industry over the past 5 years, Check Point should be a $2 billion company. Maybe, but the company is wildly profitable and seems to be turning a corner in terms of market leadership and growth.

After participating in this event, here are a few of my thoughts:

1. Check Point has always been criticized for its lack of marketing sophistication. I get this but I have to admit that it was quite refreshing to hear Check Point CEO Gil Shwed talk about the security market. No hype or spin, just his observations of changing security requirements. Unlike other CEO market visions, Gil was talking about the here and now – not the distant future. Given the current threat landscape, I think this was the right approach.

2. Check Point has always had good technology but it was all anchored by Firewall-1. Now Check Point has a solution set it calls its 3-D security architecture that includes centralized policy management and distributed enforcement using physical and virtual security tools. With this architecture, IT security can put the right control in the right place in an operationally efficient way.

3. Like other security and networking folks, Check Point now has “contextual awareness.” This means that Check Point can enforce security policies based upon the user identity, device type, location, and other attributes. This alone adds panache to the Check Point offerings.

4. You tend to forget that one of Check Point’s great strength is management. Very intuitive GUI for policy management, security monitoring, configuration management etc. Check Point can actually translate security gorp into useful business intelligence.

All in all, Check Point’s security architecture, product breadth (endpoint to data center), and resources should result in a growing pile of shekels in Tel Aviv and Redwood Shores. Nevertheless, I believe Check Point could accelerate its growth if it:

• Establishes a reference architecture and best practices. Check Point talks about how 3-D security helped it decrease the number of security events and streamline security operations in-house. Good metrics but many customers and prospects don’t know where to start. Check Point should create services, templates, reference architectures, and best practices to teach its customers how to fish here. This will create margin-rich services opportunities for its channel that will also help to pull products. Check Point says it will do this but time is money here.

• Opens up its software. 3-D security creates a software architecture with a standard data model, messaging, and APIs. Check Point should open this up to security partners to add non-Check Point value-add, and customers who want to customize the software for specific use cases. This could be the modern day equivalent of Check Point’s successful OpSec program of the early 2000s.

• Focuses on the data center. Even sophisticated shops are struggling to secure consolidated data centers populated by virtual servers. Check Point has the products to play here but it needs deployment recommendations, vertical solutions, and go-to-market tools for its sales force and channel partners. Check Point should also get deeply engaged with all of the networking vendors with network security product gaps. This list should include Arista, Avaya, Brocade, Dell, and Force 10. Since HP’s network security coverage is limited to TippingPoint, I’d knock on a few doors around Cupertino as well.

I was reminded in Chicago that Check Point is much bigger and broader than most people think. Check Point should clean up if it can deliver this same message to the market.

• Security
• Security
• 3-D security
• Arista Networks
• Avaya
• Brocade
• Check Point
• Dell
• firewall
• Force 10
• Gil Shwed
• HP