As Check Point’s consumer brand, ZoneAlarm is proud to play a pivotal role within the outstanding growth of its parent company, which provides industry-leading solutions and protecting customers from cyberattacks with an unmatched catch rate of malware and other types of threats. Gil Shwed, co-founder and CEO of Check Point, was interviewed by the Forbes magazine in December. The opening paragraph summarizes the interview’s focus: growth.
“Let’s say you start a company in 1993, take it public in 1996, sell your product in 88 countries, and are still running it in December 2017. Why not take your billions and go yachting? Why are you still at the company’s helm and eager to speed up its growth?,” read the first paragraph.
Shwed – whose 17.8% of Check Point was worth $2.9 billion on December 18, according to Forbes – took over the company in 1996. Since then it has grown substantially. 2016 revenues and profits were $1.7 billion and $725 million, respectively and its market capitalization as of December 18 was $17.8 billion – up at a 22.1% annual rate since its July 1996 IPO.
The ZoneAlarm product line was established in 1997 aiming at home PC users and small businesses. Since then, it has become the world’s leading solution to protect nearly 100 million users from all sorts of cyberattacks such as malware, ransomware, phishing, and identity theft, all based on Check Point’s pioneering and cutting-edge technology.
“The best practices for protecting home computers and consumer devices have changed. Check Point ZoneAlarm gives savvy home users the best possible protection against cybercrime. We offer enterprise-grade protection to home PC users through our award-winning products,” said Dror Levy, head of ZoneAlarm consumer division.
However, be it for businesses or individuals, Shwed seems not to be satisfied with that rate of growth.
“Our growth rate is not fast enough. How are we going to speed it up? We need to add new customers, more technologies, and new but adjacent markets. We already sell in major countries but see opportunities to sell more in China where we have 30 to 50 people, in India which is a great market, and we are opening up Africa.”
Check Point has greatly expanded the networks from which it finds and hires talent. “95% of our R&D is in Israel and the balance we got from acquisitions in Silicon Valley, Boston, and near Washington, DC. We also go outside for more creative ideas.”
The company sells globally through systems integrators and has opened offices around the world to help support those partners and their customers. As he explained, “We sell in 88 countries and have 70 offices around the world. We work with partners in these countries who are large, medium-sized and small systems integrators. Once were established in the U.S. – where we get 40% of our sales – people from other countries asked to use our product.”
Indeed Check Point first pioneered the I.T. security industry with FireWall-1 and its patented Stateful inspection technology, which is still the foundation for most network security technology today. For home PC users, ZoneAlarm’s advanced firewall monitors behaviors within your computer to spot and stop even the most sophisticated new attacks that bypass traditional antivirus and security suites.
In addition, our two-way firewall proactively protects against inbound and outbound attacks while making you invisible to hackers. This can be achieved with ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, ZoneAlarm Pro Antivirus+Firewall and ZoneAlarm Pro Firewall.
“Our technology is also used to protect home PCs from online threats and create safe web experience for your peace of mind,” Levy summarized.
