InfoWorld: Over the last several years we've seen many major IT platform providers, including Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, HP, IBM, and EMC make investments in acquiring security technologies and building their own security products.

How has this shift toward the integration of security into the operating system, network and computer hardware, software and storage changed how you will direct your own companies going forward?

Thompson: The reality is that what customers are trying to do in terms of managing access to applications and the ability to share information across the enterprise, both internal and extended, makes it incumbent upon all of us to recognize that securing that content is very important.

 Many of the companies you referenced started their lives thinking that security was something that slowed down the machine, network access, or their sales. They finally came to the realization that security is an enabler and not an inhibitor and that they must embrace it one way or another.

The real question becomes, where do customers think logically about security elements? If you look at what has evolved at Symantec, we have said that it's natural that some security technologies will live and reside in the network.

Networks have become fast enough, deep packet inspection technologies have become good enough, and we assume that as time goes on more of that will occur. And the logical place for companies to do that is with the people providing network equipment, but that's only one place where you have to protect the stream of content, another is where the users interact at a desktop or server, or where it is being managed at the gateway or applications level.

We're getting out of the network side, why compete with Cisco and Juniper and Alcatel? Why don't we partner with them and license our technologies to them because we'd like to have the scanners we have in place to become more ubiquitous, not less so. Let's move to where the user is interacting with the application, or where the application is managing the digital content. And while the competition there is no less fierce, it certainly is a place where we have real strengths that we think are worthy of us doubling down.

There's also the issue of heterogeneity. Whereas someone like Microsoft is only focused on Windows, our largest customers still run mainframes, Unix, and have interests with Linux in the applications sphere. We have to address the real world heterogeneous technologies in use within our customers, while these companies are focused on securing their own technologies.

DeWalt: One word describes our differentiation from these companies: heterogeneity.

Large companies want freedom of choice of any platform with any OS with any technology. They don't want to get locked down with Oracle, EMC, or Microsoft who only support their own releases with their security products.

How many people have moved to Vista so far? Would you trust your security requirements to a single vendor? Microsoft can tell you they will throw in security capabilities, so there's a battle between big vendors doing pieces of the stack, versus pure-plays.

This goes back to conversations of best-of-breed small vendors versus best-of-breed large vendors, and it is turning into best-of-breed security versus gigantic companies with some security in their strategy.

We bet that the cross-platform approach wins out. To support all is better than just supporting one vendor, whether for storage, the OS, or routers. Cisco is not exactly supporting Juniper anymore.

Our goal with heterogeneity is to create freedom of choice for customers to leverage, and we don't think that many of them want to get locked into one vendor.