Gene Hodges has been the chief executive officer and Director of Websense since January 2006. Prior to joining Websense, Hodges served as president of McAfee, Inc. from November 2001 to January 2006. Recently Srinivas R of CyberMedia met him at Bangalore, where Hodges shared his thoughts on latest trends in the security services and products and cautioned about the new threats that are seen currently. Excerpts:

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CIOL: What opportunities are you seeing in this downturn?

Gene Hodges: The world economy is having a very uneven impact on IT security from what we can see. Luckily, security is being fairly resilient even in countries like the US, the UK and Europe where there are significant impact on IT overall.

Even in the middle of the budget tightening, we see a very rapidly growing awareness by senior management of the need to protect their more essential information. This may be driven in some cases by regulatory changes like there is an IT Act in India or it may be driven by concerns about intellectual property (The US has had some very high-profile incidents recently)…; and for our business, that means times are actually pretty good and we feel very lucky.

CIOL: How is this slowdown affecting your customers, and do you see that customers are cutting their budgets on the security?

GH: I would say, on average around the world, security budgets are flat. They are most impacted…and the impact is not necessarily cuts, it's longer analysis periods to make sure that the right investments are being made…in countries whose currencies have devalued most against the dollar, and I think the impact of currency devaluation really isn't understood as such powerful force…

But in India the rupee has lost, as I understand, about 3 per cent. The pound is down about 35 per cent, the euro is off about 25 per cent, the real in Brazil was off 45 per cent. Customers who have some of their supply chain coming from the US, not just in software but a lot of it in the software, have to figure out how they can pay these effectively raised prices; and I think that's been a big challenge.

We are very happy, we are not in the infrastructure segment. This is an extremely difficult time I think for SAP, Microsoft, and Cisco. Our solutions are generally well below an infrastructure project's cost and so we have not seen them being budgeted out, if you will.

We do, as you know, offer data loss prevention solutions. They have probably had the roughest time because almost all are new projects and the new project gets seven signatures of scrutiny, even if it's a small, and those projects though are proceeding fairly well. As we set on our last earnings goal, this looks like a very strong quarter for data loss prevention even in the middle of such a gloomy situation.

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