Amit Yoran | Survival Guide: Perspectives from the field

What is it about a startup that you find attractive? You have the ability to have a dramatic impact. Ultimately, while many factors are beyond your control, your success or failure, and the startup's success or failure, translates into your ability to execute or not. Oftentimes in large organizations, they're en route, they're in motion, and their ability to implement dramatic change is limited. And they're also more conservative and have a more difficult time seizing an opportunity. What are the biggest challenges for a startup? You're dealing with a certain amount of technology risk, either unproven technologies or technologies that have not scaled yet. There's an execution risk: Is the management team strong enough? Do they have the experience, the drive and the competency to execute, to seize the opportunity? With startups, you get different levels of experience and different levels of competency. And then there is a business risk, everything from financing to other business dynamics. Are customers and the market suited toward working with start-ups on the type of solution that you're offering? Why is this a good time to launch NetWitness? NetWitness is operating in a very interesting intersection, and that is in looking at the security of organizations and the security of information, not only from a hacking perspective but also from an insider threat perspective. What are folks doing? And how does that violate corporate policy or regulatory compliance requirements? How will the company approach the market? We're very much inclined to work through value-added partners, whether they are other security companies or systems integrators. We feel our [company] is a piece of an overall infrastructure. What do you see as the benefit to ManTech of spinning off NetWitness? While [ManTech] is great at delivering high quality services, and in some instances at developing technology, it doesn't have a tremendous amount of experience in bringing new technologies to market, packaging them and understanding where the market is going. Nor does it have experience on how to bring this new technology to address the market need, the market demand. That's where opportunity exists for NetWitness. A year from now, what will be the signs that the company is a success? That we've significantly expanded the customer base, that we've dramatically increased revenue, and that we have elevated to a position of prominence in the field from a brand perspective. What insights into the government market did you learn at DHS? Homeland Security has a specific function: helping coordinate cyberincident response among different federal departments and agencies. They have a very regular ? and in some cases, a very deep ? interaction with many of those agencies. It was a great vantage point for understanding where people are headed, where they saw challenges and what types of problems we might be able to help them solve. What do you see as the department's biggest challenges? Bureaucracy. The size of the organization, the way it was created, the bureaucratic challenge is not trivial. The second is in mission specificity and targeting. By some definitions, Homeland Security's mission is so broad, so all-encompassing, even with however many tens of thousands of employees it has, they would be grossly under-resourced to accomplish the mission.