Symantec CEO Enrique Salem says malware signatures nearly doubled from 1.6 million in 2008 to 2.9 million in 2009. He argues companies should stop defending everything and instead protect their "crown jewels," the 1% of data that actually matters. Security spending is rebounding despite a 9% drop in overall IT budgets.
Google's recent attack by hackers have put cybersecurity in the headlines, and who better to talk about that than Enrique Salem. Enrique is president and CEO of Symantec, which provides security, storage, and system management solutions. He joins us now from San Francisco. Enrique, thanks for coming on the show. Let's talk first of all about— I'm going to set you up here— the problems with corporate security. Hacking has increased, and it's not just to steal people's credit card numbers. Now you have industrial kind of espionage really on the rise.
Yeah, that's correct. What you're seeing is the attacks have become much more targeted. In 2006, we started to predict that attackers would go after individuals, after devices, after businesses, and we've seen that continue to escalate. In 2008, we had to create 1.6 million signatures. That's more than we produced in the previous 17 years. That grew to 2,000 in 2009. To 2.9 million. So what you're seeing is an escalation in the attacks, and they're targeting financial data, credit cards and so forth, but they're also targeting other intellectual property, source code, marketing plans, and it's getting to be real dangerous out there.
Are there ways to prevent it, in your view? Can you stay one step ahead of these guys?
Yeah, what's happening is you've gotta change the approach, and you gotta think about what is it that they're going after, and it's clear that they're going after the information. They're going going after data. The notion, you know, in the old days we used to build castles with really thick walls and a big moat. Well, that's no longer the way that you got to approach this problem. You got to find out what it is they want. They want something that they can use to make money. They want something that they can use to steal future trade secrets. And so you've got to protect the information. In recent discussions with a very large company, they told me that 1% of their total data is what really matters. They called it their crown jewels. And so you got to change your approach and start thinking about how do you protect what really matters, because just trying to say we're going to protect everything is a losing battle.
So, so while this is scary, and I'm sure especially for CEOs, it's not helping you meet Wall Street's estimates with software sales. Why in this kind of environment would you miss?
Well, we actually had a good quarter in December. We beat on all the parameters. We beat the revenue expectations. We beat the earnings expectations, cash flow and deferred revenue. I think that as the market looks that this coming year they're expecting us to continue to perform very well and their expectations are going up for us. But security is a hot space. Our storage business has continued to perform well. But don't forget that last year IT budgets were down about 9%.
Enrique, 5 seconds here. Are you seeing any signs that corporations are stepping up to the plate and spending more? And I've got to ask you to be very quick here.
Yeah, you're definitely seeing a rebound in, in buying confidence, and I expect that to continue throughout the year.
All right. Good to know. Enrique, thank you so much. Enrique Salem, president and CEO of Symantec.
