eEye Ship Not 'Sinking,' CEO Says

eEye Digital Security has had plenty of upheaval this year, with the sudden departure of CEO Ross Brown in April, a round of layoffs and departures of sales and technical staff, and most recently, the quiet exodus of co-founder and CTO Marc Maiffret. (See eEye's Two Releases and Maiffret Says Bye to eEye.)

But in an interview earlier today with Dark Reading, eEye CEO Kamal Arafeh said there's nothing to the most recent speculation that Maiffret has jumped a sinking ship. Talk of problems at eEye resurfaced last week after Maiffret disclosed that he had left the company back in September, and soon will launch a new non-security startup.

Arafeh says eEye's revenue has actually increased 53 percent over the same period last year, and that it has diversified its customer base beyond the government agencies and large corporations it first targeted with its Retina vulnerability scanner.

"We've restructured, and we have a more agile process on the engineering side, and roll out more products on [better] timeframes, and we have more people testing products to make sure they are up to snuff," says Arafeh, the former senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing who took over the reins after Brown left the privately held company.

Arafeh accepts much of the blame for the slowdown this year on the research side of eEye. He says he had to first get up to speed in understanding just how research could play with the company's products.

"I had to grow professionally to understand that from our customers' perspective," he says. "We are re-emphasizing it... There's more of an emphasis on research today than there was six months ago." Look for eEye's vulnerability research to go more hand in hand with its products, he says.

He says there are still some familiar faces from the company's original research team on board, including Andre Protas, who was recently named director of research and preview services for eEye. Arafeh was unable to divulge any information on the number of employees or the research team, however.

But some security experts argue that eEye has not been in the spotlight much over the past year in public vulnerability research like it was the year before, or in its earlier days.

Why the delayed announcement of Maiffret's departure? Arafeh says there was no single reason. "It was a combination of him being worried that people would make assumptions similar to what's coming out now [and other factors]," he says. "[People] blew it out of proportion."

Maiffret said in an interview last week that he held off on spreading the word about his departure until the transition was complete.

Meanwhile, Arafeh says eEye's main source of revenue continues to be its vulnerability assessment tool, Retina, which represents about 60 percent of its business, and that the company is working on expanding into the small- to medium-sized business market here as well. Next for eEye, he says, are more form factors for its products and technologies, including new services. The company also will roll out solutions in '08 that reduce the amount of time it takes to deploy its VA and Blink endpoint products, Arafeh hinted.

Arafeh also revealed that in the next few weeks, the company will be moving from its home in Aliso Viejo, Calif., to a new headquarters space on the campus of the University of California-Irvine, where companies such as Cisco and Google also have a presence.

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading