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Lydia Zajc

Trend Micro chief executive Steve Chang hopes a beige box will help him hit a home run, in corporate terms.

The excitable founder of the data security developer enthusiastically kissed the hardware in a restaurant crowded with global executives in the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

The box, about the size of a telephone base, is the software firm's latest initiative.

It is a plug-and-play gateway called GateLock that allows subscribers to always-on, asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSL) to shield themselves from viruses, hacker attacks and intrusions for a few dollars a month.

Mr Chang, in Hong Kong for last week's Fortune Global Forum, said he was attempting to 'kill' Symantec, his company's much bigger rival.

'I'm like a sniper,' he said, jokingly likening himself to a Russian sharpshooter in the film he had just seen, Enemy at the Gates .

Mr Chang, who started Trend Micro in 1988 and took it public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, said moving into consumer hardware after years of catching viruses was a natural evolution. 'After 13 years, I am about to hit another home run,' Mr Chang said.

Trend Micro is catching an industry trend. The company now has the main business of creating software to protect companies at the network level, with products such as InterScan VirusWall, ScanMail and ServerProtect.

On the consumer software side, Symantec's Norton Antivirus has dominated the industry, holding back Trend's PC-Cillin.

Trend already has signed a deal with Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's largest telecommunications carrier, to lease GateLock to its ADSL customers for about US$3 a month.

'This is a key milestone,' Mr Chang said.

The boxes, which can be updated automatically with new software, would weed out attacks and bugs.

'It is better than software because it can be updated and stops viruses before they hit a home computer,' Mr Chang said.

He was particularly enthusiastic about the mainland market.

In Hangzhou, in Zhejiang, alone, 500,000 homes used broadband.

In China, he hoped to rent the boxes for about 80 US cents a month.

According to the 2000 China Broadband Industry Report, the mainland - which has invested close to US$2.5 billion to develop broadband infrastructure - would plough another US$2.4 billion into building a base over the next five years.

His company also is trying to crack the South Korean and Japanese markets.

Hong Kong is a much smaller market, with only a few hundred thousand consumers plugged in, but Mr Chang said his company was in talks with Pacific Century CyberWorks on bringing the firewall to its Netvigator broadband customers.

Mr Chang plans to go to India to see if he can tap that market.

At last week's Fortune Global Forum, Mr Chang told a discussion group broadband would let vendors sell software through a subscription base, helping software developers tackle the problems of piracy and security.



Box of tricks key to market