SurfControl CIO: Max Rayner

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>>Today we have Max Raider, assumed spelling the Chief information officer of SurfControl. Max could you start by giving us a brief explanation of what it is that SurfControl does?

>>Max: Sure, SurfControl is an internet information security company. The jargon sometimes used is secure content management but by whatever name we realize, as does the entire security industry, that all of the gross aspects of security have essentially been resolved. Meaning firewalls, they've been invented. Hackles and routers, they've been invented. And now it becomes what I call layer seven plus, sort of how you actually control meaningful bits, either going in or coming out and that is our business, to look at the content, to look at human behavior on the internet.

>>What are the main technology areas that, you know, really excite you when you look forward to the next year?

>>Max: We're a particularly global company. We have engineering in Israel, Beijing, Sydney, the UK, the U.S. and contract researchers around the world as part of our threat research duties. And so we have, more so than many companies, a need for technology that allows one to be seamless around the globe. So one example that most people view with some suspicion was it a plot by Telco's to charge more or what was it? The advent of MPLS, clearly a major step forward because once you are a member of that cloud, say you buy a company in a new country? You don't have to start guessing which pipes should go from where to where, you open an MPLS port in that country and you're done. You have optimized connections around the world. That would be a you know, most fundamental way. Other aspects that you know we're totally committed to, we've moved the entire company to IB inaudible

>>Oh really?

>>Max: Because it's inaudible because it increases productivity so as part of A, the global MPLS deployment, B, IT deployment around the company. We're saving a lot of money since we have people in all sorts of parts of the world, calling each other internationally. There's significant savings on the money side. We're also becoming more nimble because we're now able to do tech support 24/7. As people call us, if the UK has now gone to bed, well the U.S. carries on and when we get to the end of the U.S. day, well Israel and Beijing carry on. So those are examples of technologies that I think actually do have an impact in helping us do more for less.

>>When it comes to your plans next year, do you think you'll be spending more or less on IT in general?

>>Max: More and more because we've realized that these are not costs, these are investments and its part of the reason, its unusual thing in many companies to have the CIO be also ahead of the product development. We just recognize that the underlying systems were the conduits that allowed us to be efficient and that a business approach to what was needed was more important than a cost continuant approach. Very few companies have grown by cutting and in our case we have committed to growing by investing and by leveraging our resources around the world. A standard yard stick for IT spend in companies is often five percent of revenues. We believe that for a technology company you should invest more than that because you actually know how to exploit the technology to maximum advantage. And it depends on how trivial you take security or seriously you take security so is there a price on doing wireless right? No, no really cause if you do it wrong any 13 year old in their mom's van can come and snoop your network. So investing in inaudible so that you're never exposed on your wireless and all the wireless that we ever provide in this company are open to the internet.

>>What do you all use as an open source in priority, especially where security is concerned?

>>Max: Open source actually has a healthy affect on security because it allows a vast community to expose fallacies or defects in products so we certainly are not part of these security camp and if it's truly secure it ought to be intrinsically so, not because you've hidden it. As a matter or principal, the more open you are about the nature of your solution, the more secure it would be.

>>What is your view in outsourcing and do you actually take advantage of it?

>>Max: To a certain extent but outsourcing was much misunderstood and there was this entire era where, in my view, outsourcing was being done for political and gloss over reasons, meaning if you do outsourcing -- suppose you have 200 people executing the function and suppose you quote outsource it. And it's now costing more and producing less. Okay so in your reports to Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange and so on, you're able to say I have 200 less people but what's hidden is that your cut spaces just went up and you became less flexible. That's just silly. That's management for show rather than for results. So one of the things that we've routinely looked at and this goes back to my days at Sun where we continuously benchmarked the cost effectiveness for example of our database administration team, which we ran 24/7, follow the sun around the world and it turned out that the cheapest outfit in India couldn't be cheap enough to be in our productivity. So the rational economic choice was, don't outsource. So it was for a while just a fad and people were doing it so that they could go to their cocktail parties with their CIO friends and say, oh, I outsourced. laughter And they were hiding the fact that it was actually increasing the cost. So I'm not opposed to it but it's an economic decision. It shouldn't be a religious decision.

>>As a CIO, what do you say are your key measures for success?

>>Max: Ah, actually a mentor of mine and former CIO at Sun Microsystems, has this formula that says, quality time's acceptance equals effectiveness. And I often go back to that notion because so many of our peers in technology are enamored of technology alone and fail to pause and think about what is the human factor, would people want to use it? Does it bring enough customer delight that people will actually cooperate or do you have to fight them every step of the way to use it? So as I look at all these solutions and in fact at a lot of security solutions, the question is always, okay so it may be technically elegant, will it be accepted? Because if it isn't it's just a long universe. Entropy and humans will find a way to surprise you in the most intriguing ways and you cannot ever possibly predict all the risks. But as a friend of mine from IDC here in this region, Willy Low, assumed spelling likes to say, you can't anticipate the predictable results of anticipatable outcomes. You don't know whether a monsoon will take down half the internet in India but you know that it could happen and so you can start working yourself around to that possibility.

>>What are your views about Vista? What plans do you have for moving to that, if any?

>>Max: We acknowledge it both as a commercial reality and sort of as a CIO decision. So if we distinguish those two for a moment, as a CIO decision I will be expecting evidence that upgrade to Vista has a positive ROI. I'm sure that our friends at Microsoft will work rather hard at making that case to industry. A lot of the CIO's I talk to are exactly in the same camp of it's a good thing, it's step forward in making Windows more secure at the client layer and yet we need to balance that with the commercial reality of it. That is just a cost effectiveness if you will question. From a perspective of a products company, clearly we need to be on Window's decertifying our products on Vista and so on and that's exactly what we're doing. So we have no question that betting against Microsoft and the desktop is something that a few people have lost their careers and companies at. Although there's intriguing trends, in any emerging economy you'll see Linux and other solutions, it's just a commercial reality that we have to be there.

>>Max, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

>>Max: You're most welcome. Thank you very much, a pleasure.

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