FLU I heard Websense is strong man. They are private yeah? You think they will ever go public?
I also keep my eyes on Entropic. Lots of old cats like me over there.
SD Realtor
Websense is actually public already. (WBSN)
I'm not an expert in the security/content filtering field. At one point in my career, I worked for Symantec, which BTW appeared very disfunctional…But anyway some of these security companies are having a real tough time these days, because a lot of this stuff is quickly becoming commoditized. And they are running into the same problem that just about every big tech company these days are running into. They are desperately trying to find the next big "growth strategy". Because a tech company with a "value" valuation is a death march to getting delisted from Nasdaq (or NYSE).
Symantec saw the writing on the walls a long time ago, even when their stock was hitting 50-60/share and when everyone on wall street was thinking they would be unstoppable. Internally they were shitting in their pants because they knew the AntiVirus/Security market would get saturated when Microsoft announced they were jumping in in and once networking companies started to think about offering hardware based security with software bundles. Symantec started to try to reinvent themselves during their peak, bringing people like me in to help build new products. I didn't stay long, because I didn't think execution and direction was going to work, and things got really weird. Pretty soon, Microsoft did enter the market, and Juniper Networks and Cisco acquired a slew of security companies to shore up hardware and software based security, and suddenly the security market because extremely crowded. On top of that, Symantec did something imho really weird. Instead of building up their expertise in security, they diluted their knowledge by buying Veritas (a file storage company). To this day, I don't get the synergy between file storage and security, and doing such a large acquisition probably set them back in security with every other competitor entering the market. Hence, the $17-18 stock price now. On the other hand, Macafee, focused on what they did best (besides being involved in accounting scandals :)) and turned the company around.
WebSense isn't a pure security player. They do a lot of content filtering apps and mal-ware detection. But like I said, it seems like stuff like this is getting commoditized pretty fast. People seem to expect this stuff should all be free and cheap, just like PC's. They're well off their all time highs too.
That said, I can tell you what i think is the latest buzzwords in the IT space these days. "Service Oriented Architecture", "Cloud computing", "grid computing". Fancy terms for having a pool of computing/storage resources that you can reuse. In other words, buy your IBM stock now. It's only a matter of time before mainframe makes a comeback. There is nothing "innovative" about enterprise software. It's a cyclical process between client/server distributed computing and mainframe/centralized computing, depending on which way the wind is blowing in the industry. All the hoopla is around the new programming languages and buzzwords that enables the prevailing strategy that was invented by a bunch of companies trying to make a buck by convincing you the "new paradigm" supported by the new hardware/software they are trying to sell you is better than what you bought last year. And once again Sun Microsystems is late to the game, as usual.
It's also why if you want to play in the enterprise software space for a long long time, it's much easier to be an architect than a raw programmer. Programming and programming languages change all the time, and you can't compete with the kid out of college. As an architect, once you seen a couple of architectures, it pretty much all looks the same. There's only so many design patterns you can practically apply in real systems.
