Pete Patamis wrote: > Curious to hear some opinions - is this a symptom of a > general economic downturn in the tech sector or do > you think the info sec industry is starting to undergo some > consolidation? The short answer is: it depends. Certainly some of the InfoSec companies will consolidate (ISS bought Network Ice, Axent got swallowed), as the entire tech sector is re-evaluated in a more realistic manner. On the upside, some of these accquisitions could also lead to new opportunities, as these restructured companies develop new offerings. On a high level, I think the security market is actually on the rise, since part of the re-assessment of what is acceptable business practice in the IT world is applying commonsense business practices (sounds fair to me), which means being prudent about protecting your assets. Personally, I'm actually seeing a heightened awareness of security, and a view of this as an operating cost, rather than an afterthought. HIPAA, and some similar legislation for the financial sector, should drive this as well. It is true that over the past few months the cool hacker startup jobs are a lot harder to find, but I'm finding the Fortune 1000 are actually beefing up security staff quite a bit, as they add more B2B, Ecom, and telecommuter services, all of which need a lot of InfoSec infrastructure and a lot of support. That's unfortunate for me, since I was really hoping for another cool hacker startup :) ... but there certainly don't appear to be any shortage of opportunities out there. I think this is what's going on in a lot of IT right now -- Corporate America is catching on, and building a lot of these services in-house, and staffing accordingly, which is shifting a lot of the jobs away from the dot-coms. If security awareness continues to grow, though, third-party assessment and audit work should increase as well, so the consulting and MSS folks, like @stake and Foundstone (and even the Big 5) should grow as well. --shawn -- s h a w n m o y e r shawn@net-connect.net "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." --George Carlin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed May 02 2001 - 18:54:08 PDT