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Searching for McAfee at CeBIT

It is always a mystery why major vendors miss out on industry defining trade shows.Here at CeBIT for the first year ever a special expo hall has been dedicated to security (Halle 7).
Written by Richard Stiennon, Contributor

It is always a mystery why major vendors miss out on industry defining trade shows.

Here at CeBIT for the first year ever a special expo hall has been dedicated to security (Halle 7). A quick estimate is that the size of this hall is about half the size of the RSA security conference in San Francisco.

One security vendor who has made it a point to avoid trade shows for years in Checkpoint Software. They were only represented here by partners and distributors. But you really have to ask if Checkpoint's lack of marketing muscle and presence at such shows have led to the current state of affairs. From the 4 or 5 firewall vendors that existed when Checkpoint pretty much dominated the space there are now dozens of firewall vendors. You have to wonder what would have happened if Checkpoint had continued a presence at trade shows? Would Netscreen ever have gotten the toe-hold it did?

Now look at CeBIT this year. Symantec, Panda and Trend dominate one end of Halle 7. But where is McAfee? Not to be found. Search the CeBIT web site and you get ZERO hits. Look around in Halle 7 and you see Sophos, BitDefender, Kaspersky, even a brand new AV vendor called Dr. Web from Russia. What is going on? Is McAfee giving up on Europe?

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