Happy Birthday atsec!
2010-01-11Today the atsec team celebrates its 10th anniversary of operation. For this special occasion, we asked our CEO, Salvatore La Pietra, to write a “Laudation”:
10 years! WOW! We made it, and it’s impossible to hide our excitement!!
Ten years ago, atsec was a just-realized dream, the fruit of a hopeful partnership of three friends and colleagues in Germany. Today, atsec is a thriving, successful reality in Europe, the U.S. and China. We extend our deepest thanks to our customers, our people, and to all those who have supported us over the years.
In the decade since our founding, there have of course been many changes within atsec to support our emergence and growth as a respected international company in the Information Security community. The amazing thing is that the core qualities of atsec’s character have not changed: our enthusiasm, our energy, our caring and support for one another, and our shared passion for information security. The principles that we articulated on our very first day as atsec:
know the business,
stay focused,
be independent, and ….
… above all, act with integrity
remain our guiding principles today and will continue to guide us into the future.
I find it very satisfying that consistent application of our core qualities and our guiding principles not only make atsec successful, it helps to make our customers and the whole Information Security industry successful. We can all take pride in knowing that atsec’s energy is helping to forge better security standards for the whole Information Security community. By diligently applying those standards both to our everyday customer engagements and to our own organization, we offer to others and provide for ourselves the most respected and responsible information security practices in the world. In the years to come, we will continue to monitor and improve those standards, as well as persist in helping our customers improve their products and organizations from the IS point of view.
I am proud of our management team, which has provided healthy leadership resulting in 10 years of steady growth for atsec. We act responsibly and have managed our growth wisely. We are reliable and respectful towards our customers and our employees. We compete strongly and fairly in the market. We take carefully considered risks when we determine that pursuing our strategic goals merits such investment. We have made some mistakes in the last 10 years … but we learned from those disappointments and emerged stronger from them, even better equipped to make good decisions when presented with new opportunities going forward.
Looking forward, there is still lot to do: continue to improve the standards; give even more to our customers for the money they invest in information security; further enable our people; and accept the challenges that will undoubtedly emerge in the next generation of the information revolution. Inevitably, the developing technologies and the more complex use of them mean that we will focus on security architecture, cloud computing, virtualization, new security criteria based on risk management, risk mitigation, … and who knows what else. As the world’s need for mature security and privacy paradigms evolves, atsec will be right here to lead in developing the services, tools and techniques needed to address those challenges… for the next 10 years and beyond!
Many thanks to you all.
…sal
