KaVaDo CTO believes in tech leaders' powers of persuasion To survive the economic downturn, KaVaDo CTO and co-founder Yuval Ben-Itzhak focused on designing security software that provides customers with an immediate payback. The Tel Aviv-based company’s Web application scanner and firewall products proactively define acceptable behavior with respect to Web application use, rather than reactively target specific patterns and signatures that require continuous updates.Ben-Itzhak conceived the software and participates in several standards groups, including Open Web Security Application Project‘s VulnXML Project Committee and OASIS’s Web Application Security Technical Committee. “The people on the committees are competitors,” he says, “but behind the scenes, we’re trying to shape the market.”He notes that CTOs have to balance legacy and future applications. “The CTO needs to predict [growth patterns] in order to deliver the right vision at the right time,” he says. SecuritySoftware Development