Trend Micro celebrated its 20th anniversary and held its first industry analyst meeting in NYC. The discussion was anything but backward looking. Trend is taking a sharp (and interesting) turn in their A/V strategy having decided that modern attackers can't be defended against with a client-focused solution -- the attackers are getting too clever at creating dynamic and polymorphic attacks which makes signature files grow without bound, signature file updates intolerable, and the desktop client bloated and slow. Trend's solution is to move more of the analysis and mitigation into the cloud, evolving from a signature file solution to an on-demand analysis solution in which the client queries a cloud service to evaluate a threat not in a local cache. It seems one more piece of evidence of how rapidly SaaS is coming on us. The event gave me a chance to sit down and chat with Trend's charming and energetic founder and CEO -- Eva Chen. I asked Eva how Trend came to be in the A/V business. It's yet another story of ambitious entrepreneurs adapting plans to find the market. Their first idea was terminal emulation software into China, but they knew that without some form of protection their IP (and business) would soon dissipate so they developed a "dongle" that would descramble part of the program if properly attached to a licensed computer. Then they just focused on the dongle/protection business. An early customer complained to Eva that the dongle was damaging their software, and when she investigated she found the residue of one of the earliest viruses to blame, not the dongle, and so they went into the A/V business (and the rest is history as the old saying goes). Trend is an amazingly distributed company (Eva in Pasadena, the CTO in Germany, the head of Enterprise in Boston). It was a real treat to have them all assembled in one place.
