FishNet Security

Gary Fish moved out of his basement, hired his first employee and began selling Check Point Software Technologies firewalls to ISPs in 1996. He has been all security ever since, building FishNet into one of Check Point’s largest North American resellers with 77 employees and four offices.

After spending 2002 in what he calls an expansion mode, opening two new offices, producing service offerings and bolstering his team of engineering consultants, he spent 2003 reaping the rewards of those investments. FishNet’s sales grew 56 percent, services climbed from 20 percent to 25 percent of revenue and the company enjoyed its highest gross product margins in years, Fish said.

“In ’02 we put the emphasis on expansion and ’03 worked on growth and the bottom line,” he said. “As a privately held company, we’re very frugal. We go through these cycles where in ’04 you’ll see us do more expansion.”

FishNet is continuing to expand its sales of best-of-breed products in such hot areas as SSL VPNs, spam control, intrusion prevention and wireless security. But FishNet plans to grow its auditing, consulting, training, engineering and other services even faster.

New initiatives include private-labeling a monitoring service, back-ended by Solutionary, launching a wireless security training program and selling more services through partners. By being a security-only company and packaging services for resale, FishNet has been able to attract more partners for its services. Fish is talking to a large software reseller about a partnership. “That part of our business is really beginning to heat up,” he said.

 Published for the Week Of March 29, 2004