Check Mate - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News, April, 1999 by Ripley Hotch

How to win a battle without losing the war.

Deborah Triant Rieman has always been on the cutting edge, from the time she was a flower child to now, when the company she helped to build dominates the firewall market and is taking aim at the hottest market in networking: VPNs.

Up until a few weeks ago, she was founder, president, and CEO of Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., the U.S. subsidiary of an Israeli company of the same name. After four years of building the company to its current success, she wanted to cut back on operations and focus on long-range strategy and corporate partnerships. A new marriage and a desire for more family time, as well as a more mature management team at the company, she says, pushed the decision. "When you take a company from a fledgling to what it is today, that's pretty grueling. It's the most exciting thing I've ever done, but time consuming." And she doesn't have a title--except that she's still a member of the board--because "the people I meet know me."

Indeed they do. Her long passage from Haight-Ashbury ("After a year, I got real and went back to school.") to Check Point made her ideal for the job. A mathematician by training, she left a professorship at the University of California at Santa Cruz to work for Mitre Corp. to develop network management protocols for what she describes with a chuckle as "This incredible more-than-state-of-the-art extreme-bleeding-edge over-the-air network that was packet-based, time-division, frequency-division, and code-division multiplexing." It was essentially a military network, but the protocols were similar to Internet protocols.

From that techie beginning, Rieman moved to Xerox, ending up in marketing. Then stints as a consultant and with Sun and Adobe broadened her management experience, as well as her experience with different technologies. It was at Adobe that Rieman says she became an "Internet bigot."

"I was running marketing for all of Adobe, but I spent a lot of my time focusing on the transition that was happening to digital information. In those days the Internet was just beginning to get out of the 'only used for e-mail by researchers' phase. So, while at Adobe, I began to try to push the entire organization to focus on the Internet as becoming the first medium for truly digital document information exchange--and got hooked on the future of the Internet."

It would have seemed that she would have started a company providing content over the Web, but instead, Rieman became intrigued by an Israeli company that made a firewall. That was Check Point.

"I believed at the time security didn't get much attention," she says, "but it seemed clear that it had to and that the explosion on the Internet would bring a corresponding need for a new approach to security." What Check Point had in its architecture was that new approach.

"Traditional firewalls had been around for a long time and had an old architectural approach that worked very well for the early days of the Internet when there was very little traffic and very few applications that had to run over the connection," she says. The Check Point architecture conceived of working through security policies, not managing devices. The conception would work across an enterprise with many devices and many connections rather than assuming there was one way to the outside.

"Plus," says Rieman, "the vision behind the product extended beyond the firewall." Check Point assumed that the system was not the firewall but the security policy. Then there were enforcement agents scattered through the network, running a single security policy. The agents were a lightweight piece of portable code that could live on any kind of platform. "I saw something here that was a fundamentally new technology that had much broader applications."

The vision intrigued her enough to entice her into becoming the founder and CEO of the U.S. subsidiary of Check Point. Since she was strong technically, as well as having a marketing background, she was well suited to the task.

She succeeded, and Check Point has a list of clients that reads like a "who's who" of communications companies: Sprint, AT&T, MCI, UUNET, GTE, Deutsche Telekom, NTT, France Telecom, U S West, and many more. "We've virtually locked up the ISP and telco market for doing managed Internet services," she says. "We're actually seeing a very rapid ramp-up of their investment in managing security and installing virtual private networks."

Estimates of the size of Check Point's market share put it as high as 40%. The company was able to leverage the architecture into wider security areas and, eventually, into VPNs. "We've got 10,000 installations of VPN."

In Rieman's view, Check Point has an advantage because it regards a VPN as part of the security management system. "Most of the companies that are doing VPNs are doing them as though it was a separate product," she says. "So you've got your security system and then you've got your VPN. We don't look at it that way at all. If you try to overlay all these separate systems--encryption, authentication, VPN, firewall access control, intrusion detection--it becomes absolutely unmanageable."