Moscow seemed alive and intriguing, bedecked with lights and punctuated with billboards. There were tall brightly lit Christmas trees every few blocks along the way. As we drove past Red Square on the way to the Grand Hotel in Moscow, the Kremlin was lit up like a fairy castle. It was all totally unexpected.

When Western journalists used to visited Soviet Russia, just a few decades ago, they wrote of Moscow as being drab, forbidding and colourless. That Moscow no longer exists. It died and was reborn anew. Now it is wealthy, vibrant and exciting. At night, its beauty challenges that of London, Paris and New York. The trapping of capitalism are everywhere; both the good and the bad. There’s rock music on the radio, advertising is ubiquitous and retail is king.

Against this backdrop, I guess it should be no surprise that Russia has produced a fast-growing software company like Kaspersky Labs and that it would be capable of organizing a press and analyst conference that was every bit as professional as any organized by a Western technology company.

Kaspersky Labs is a rising star in the AV market, currently growing at the remarkable rate of 130%, with revenues for 2007 somewhere in the region of $200 million. The company is only 10 years old, although CEO, Eugene Kaspersky, was coding AV software a while before Kaspersky Labs was established. The company achieved its position in the AV market through technical excellence, OEMing its scanning engine to other players in the market and establishing a strong presence both in the retail market and through the channels. It is now targeting the enterprise and there’s little to suggest that it will have much difficulty gaining a foothold there too.

Kaspersky Labs is no longer just an AV company, it also has a division, called Info Watch, that specializes in data security. Nevertheless, if it is to compete globally with the major security players, like Symantec, CA and Checkpoint, then ultimately it will need to broaden its portfolio further. The company is privately held, but will most likely undergo an IPO in 2008 on the London market, and may thus obtain the financial clout to grow by acquisition.

Kaspersky Labs is a company whose fate I will track.

P.S. If you read On The Road to Moscow, you will know that I intended to put my registered dollar in the hands of a Russian, in the hope that its journey to Moscow would become a matter of record. As luck would have it, I sat next to Evgeny Buyakin, Kaspersky labs CFO, at a restaurant on Saturday night. So I handed him the precious one dollar bill, in the sure knowledge that the fate of the bill will tell me a great deal about his ability to manage money.

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