Security innovation is alive and well

36,000 FEET ABOVE GREENLAND -- I tried to look down and identify the shores of Greenland. I knew it was below me, or at least the airplane’s navigation system was convinced it was there, but I could see nothing (clouds and an uncooperative seatmate weren’t helping). I was pretty sure that the little airplane symbol moving across the electronic map was correct: We had left Europe and were almost to North America.

I’d been in Germany to check out the newest offerings at the giant CeBit electronics show in Hanover. This show, with nearly 700,000 attendees and over 6,600 exhibitors, could provide insights into the direction of the IT industry that you don’t often see at shows with more limited attendance. This year, it was clear that IT is on a rebound, especially in the United States, if the number of U.S. companies at the show was any indication.

For all practical purposes, the entire U.S. computer security industry was at CeBit this year. In some cases they sent their European offices, but they were there nonetheless, showing the same products as they did at the RSA show, and in many cases, the same stuff as at last year’s shows. Likewise, the well-known European vendors were showing the same wares we’ve all come to know.

But the healthy economy has started adding new players to the industry, and those new players are coming from places we used to think of being old adversaries or from places we never associated with technology.

As you’d expect, the Russians -- led by anti-virus expert Kaspersky Labs -- were there in force. One product, with the unlikely name of Zorp, arrived from Balabit in Budapest, Hungary. It appears to be a highly feature-rich, easy-to-manage firewall that handles such things as in-line cryptography and streaming media.

We’ll find out if Balabit’s software is as innovative as it looks when the InfoWorld Test Center kicks its tires. Meanwhile, the company was doing its best to look innovative with a campaign slogan of "The Joy of Security" emblazoned on bright-purple condoms.

What’s really more important, though, was a level of enthusiasm and excitement that I hadn’t seen for a while in any industry at any trade show. Clearly, in central and eastern Europe, the security business was on the rebound. The reasons surprised me.

Yes, the freeing up of money played a big role, no surprise there. But what seemed to be spurring innovation was the vast number of highly trained people accustomed to working under adverse conditions. If you remember the trade conditions of 10 years ago, getting decent computers into the former Soviet bloc was nearly impossible. When the rest of the world had Pentiums, those newly open societies had only castoffs, their needs unmet.

As a result, the programmers in these countries used the skills they had to build better software, but without the code bloat and useless features of software you see from elsewhere. Suddenly, the Russians and their friends were writing the best code around.

This was not lost on security company executives, who freely admit that the technical training and skills born of the Cold War translate easily into the security products of today. Fortunately, these products won’t remain a mystery in the West. Every company I talked to was either beginning to sell to the U.S. market or was just about to start. The Cold War, it appears, is developing a new set of winners.