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Thursday, April 22, 2004
Toral: New kid in town
By Janette Toral
Digital Filipino
SETTING UP. No- thing gives me greater satisfaction than meeting
potential investors online and finally seeing them set up their operations.
I felt so proud when Bigfoot came to Cebu and finally put up their office. Today, they are one of the most dynamic companies in the area.
Two years ago, I got an interesting e-mail from Lawrence Hughes whose wife is from Cebu and will retire here. Lawrence has been working in the IT sector for more than 30 years. He is the co-founder of CipherTrust (http://www.ciphertrust.com), the leading company in e-mail security, including corporate anti-spam.
The e-mail of 25percent of the US Fortune 100 is going through CipherTrust’s IronMail today, including companies such as Coca Cola, Walmart, and UPS.
Prior to that, he also worked with Verisign
(http://www.verisign.com). He created the Verisign
Certified Administrator and Verisign Certified Engineer courseware, and presented it internationally.
One of his objectives in retiring in Cebu is to start another potential successful company, InfoWeapons (http://www.infoweapons).
The company will create a new line of secure Internet appliances that implement critical network infrastructure, hardened against hacker attacks, worms, denial of service attacks etc. It will perform functions similar to IronMail, but for other Internet services and protocols.
Lawrence’s target markets are the US and European Union. Its office
will be at Keppel building.
But Lawrence is also aware of the many challenges he’s facing in putting up this organization.
This includes finding consistent high-quality bandwidth, personnel with adequate background, finding ways around software patents, getting quality equipment, and dealing with limited ownership rights (like real estate).
On the positive side, he appreciates the tax holiday
for pioneer status and meeting bright people that just need additional training and experience.
Lawrence believes that IT professionals who would like to succeed in building software must read real code to know how it is done, ignoring most of the lessons taught in computer science.
Programmers must learn how to code securely and defensively. Be obsessive about quality.
Learn about capitalism and entrepreneurship. Create world-class technology and companies. Find people more skillful than yourself, work with them and learn.
One good thing Lawrence did was to get to know the country and the people much better.
Apart from giving technical insights in Cyberpromdi and Digital-Filipino Yahoogroups, he also delivered lectures in several local conferences. He also conducts Verisign Public Key Infrastructure
workshops in the country.
Let’s give three cheers to Lawrence and Info-Weapons. Filipinos will be given the chance to learn how to program security software from a respected security guru.
(email: janette@digitalfilipino.com.)
(April 22, 2004 issue)
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