SonicWall CEO: Application awareness crucial for IT security

Next-generation firewall vendor's chief addresses challenges and opportunities of securing everything from cloud computing to iPhones to Facebook at work

SonicWall once focused on small and midsize businesses, but its introduction earlier this year of a next-generation firewall line dubbed SuperMassive leaves no doubt that the company is now taking aim at larger enterprises. In fact, the privately-held San Jose company's CEO, Matt Medeiros, says the enterprise market accounted for nearly half of SonicWall's sales over the past six months. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Medeiros spoke recently with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant and InfoWorld Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr. 

What's SonicWall's general approach to IT security?

There is still a substantial amount of bad malware, viruses and Trojans being written by sophisticated software development teams that are invading your networks at any moment, and our primary service is stopping that from happening. Second to that, it is our fundamental belief that organizations need to enable their networks and employees to be more productive. Four years ago, there were mostly really restricted policies -- you know, don't let things happen in your network that you're not in control of. Forbid people from bringing their own devices onto the network, using their own applications at home and even tapping into the network unless they're on the LAN. We fundamentally believe very differently. We have to unleash the power of the network. We want to enable people to use any device anywhere and use any type of application that is business worthy on the network and then give you the CIO, CFO or CEO the power to mitigate how much time, where, who and what has access to that information, those applications and those business processes that are important.

SonicWall once focused on small and midsize businesses, but its introduction earlier this year of a next-generation firewall line dubbed SuperMassive leaves no doubt that the company is now taking aim at larger enterprises. In fact, the privately-held San Jose company's CEO, Matt Medeiros, says the enterprise market accounted for nearly half of SonicWall's sales over the past six months. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Medeiros spoke recently with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant and InfoWorld Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr. 

What's SonicWall's general approach to IT security?

There is still a substantial amount of bad malware, viruses and Trojans being written by sophisticated software development teams that are invading your networks at any moment, and our primary service is stopping that from happening. Second to that, it is our fundamental belief that organizations need to enable their networks and employees to be more productive. Four years ago, there were mostly really restricted policies -- you know, don't let things happen in your network that you're not in control of. Forbid people from bringing their own devices onto the network, using their own applications at home and even tapping into the network unless they're on the LAN. We fundamentally believe very differently. We have to unleash the power of the network. We want to enable people to use any device anywhere and use any type of application that is business worthy on the network and then give you the CIO, CFO or CEO the power to mitigate how much time, where, who and what has access to that information, those applications and those business processes that are important.

Our readership deals with lots of security companies. What sets SonicWall apart?

We provide the best firewall, which is primarily focused on malware. We also bring an integrated set of features that complement the security aspects of your network, but that enable you to maintain your network in a far more productive way. Instead of having a discrete device, we have integrated features like gateway AV, IPS, filtering and blocking, and there are now application awareness features allowing you to look at who's utilizing your network and the way that they are utilizing their network. In addition, we've incorporated things like SSL VPN, e-mail security/anti-spam.

Who's the SonicWall customer? Traditionally you've been more SMB focused, but with the SuperMassive firewall featuring more than 40Gbps of throughput you're moving way upscale.

About five years ago we made the decision to move upscale and the reason why we made that decision is because we not only were providing security for small businesses, we were also doing a lot of distributed remote branch office work primarily for corporate enterprises. They came to us and said "Look, you guys are doing a great job at the edge, at our remote branch offices and we think you have an opportunity to play here at the hub." So we developed a product road map that would suggest we could do that. I'm pleased to report that 45% of our revenue for the last six months has come from enterprises -- anything above 1,000 employees.

ANALYSIS: Is a next-gen firewall in your future? 

A lot of people challenge us over "Well, how are we going to get away from our SMB roots?" But I have never seen a virus or malware that is prejudicial. Sorry, you're a small company so you get a small virus and you know what, you're the big guy so we're sending you the big heavy load. It just doesn't work that way. So from our perspective, we always had the technology. What we needed to do is recognize it was a completely different capacity level at the hub of the data center and there were certain features that were going to make a big difference in that data center environment that we didn't necessarily have to provide in an SMB environment.

Could you address your competitors in the heavyweight class as well?

The 800-pound gorilla is Cisco. Juniper, Check Point, Fortinet, those are the companies we are competing with as well.

If we're up for a bonafide RFP where they truly aren't just shopping and trying to negotiate for the incumbent, we are doing very well. It's really all about just getting the at-bats.