How do you differentiate yourself in a crowded anti-virus market? One avenue is to start innovating in new areas. I had a chat with Trend Micro’s new North American VP, Lane Bess, today and he signaled that the company is working on developing deep-packet inspection and port-level security technologies.“Deep packet containment is going to happen, that’s going to be the next wave over the next 12 to 18 months,” he said. Bess agreed with my assertion that developing more intelligent packet-based security products can help companies like Trend Micro, Symantec and Network Associates rise above the noise. “I’d give up the opportunity to buy a great company to know that we have innovated,” he said.That sounds promising to me because the anti-virus business is a tough place to try and stand out from the crowd. It’s not a question of whether you can produce the right patch to the latest worm. It’s all about improving the time lag between virus detection and patch distribution. The lower that figure, the happier your customers. Not easy by any stretch, but it’s still a technically straight forward problem to solve. In that context I’d argue building technology that dives deeper into the core problems surrounding network traffic management is a far more interesting proposition, and one we should track more closely. Proactively preventing worms etc from spreading at any point in the network has to be better than distributing a cure after the fact. Technology Industry