Check Point Aims Wide and High

In July, Check Point Software beat Wall Street estimates when the company posted over $300 million in revenue, up 15% from 2Q 2010. Check Point also reported that product and software licensing revenue is up 15% from a year ago.Why is Check Point growing? Check Point firewalls have always held a very valuable piece of network real estate, separating corporate networks from a crime infested community called the Internet. But while Check Point has always had one of the best firewalls available, it couldn’t leverage its firewall leadership to capitalize on other security needs.As the financial results indicate, those days are now done. In the past year, Check Point introduced “software blades” that provide discrete security software functionality that can be run anywhere in the enterprise but centrally managed. Four months ago, Check Point introduced software blades for application control, DLP, identity awareness, and mobile security — all hot areas. While Check Point was re-architecting its products over the last year, enterprise organizations were desperately adding new security controls, rationalizing their security products, and searching for tightly integrated security suites. Unlike the unfortunate fishermen from Gloucester, MA, Check Point sailed into a perfect storm that seems to producing plenty of benefits.This week, Check Point made two announcements that should accelerate its momentum. First, Check Point announced a new version of its software (R75.20) that provides additional security protection across all server blades with things like URL filtering and SSL termination. Yes, these aren’t new features, but remember that Check Point integration cascades these features across all security applications. In other words, more security and more integration — just what enterprise CISOs are looking for. As part of this announcement, Check Point will also roll-out a new family of high performance of appliances. Okay, I know what you are thinking. Appliances are so 2007, won’t security be run as a VM or in the cloud? Sometimes, but not in high-bandwidth data center networks anytime soon. Large enterprises need appliances that can run multiple concurrent security applications on high bandwidth networks without any performance degradation. Check Point’s new appliances can do this, even at the very high-end. This should provide new market opportunities in the wireless carrier, eCommerce, and cloud computing markets. So to sum it up, Check Point now has a bunch of security applications and a family of high-end appliances to run them on. Oh and Check Point has always been known for its management and operations tools as well. If you continue to think of Check Point as a firewall company you are dead wrong. Gil Shwed and company may have the broadest network security portfolio available from a single vendor today.