Network Associates tossing wider net

NEW YORK - Network Associates  last week laid out plans to move into new areas, from spam control to intrusion prevention, as well as to augment its antivirus, help desk and protocol analysis products.

CEO George Samenuk, speaking at the company's annual Wall Street analysts briefing, wasn't forced to spend much time convincing anyone that the company has cleaned up its act since he came onboard two years ago amid mounting financial losses. But the big question was whether the company, which turned a healthy profit last year and is aiming for $1 billion-plus in revenue this year, can succeed in expanding beyond its core markets with offerings that address an ever-more-complex network security  environment.

"A year ago we didn't have a lot of new product announcements, but this year you will see a blitz from us," Samenuk said.

Network Associates officials said customers are demanding faster response times to threats, pointing out that intrusion-prevention equipment will play a key role. Such products are designed to block attacks, not just detect them as do intrusion-detection systems (IDS ). Network Associates plans to get into that market next year, although the announcement was short on details.

"As an industry, we aren't stopping these attacks well," President Gene Hodges said. "You have to be able to make a decision in the network in startlingly short time spans, moving from what was once hours to a fraction of a second."

Network Associates' new interest in intrusion prevention is complicated by the company's involvement with Internet Security Systems (ISS), which specializes in intrusion detection. Because Network Associates lacked its own intrusion-detection offering, the company last year licensed IDS technology from ISS to incorporate into a gigabit-speed edition of the Sniffer protocol analyzer - dubbed Impermia - scheduled to be available by midyear.