I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Camille Tuuti of ExecutiveBiz to discuss my role as director of Federal Business Development at McAfee, as well as what we at McAfee see as emerging trends and threats. Below are a few highlights from our conversation, which appears in the latest Executive Profile feature:

ExecutiveBiz: Looking at the success McAfee has had, what is the recipe to being a successful government partner?

Tom Conway: I think in our case it is focus. We are focused only on security. There are big companies that dabble in it that have a small percentage of their business in security. At the other end of the spectrum, there are some very small, innovative companies out there that are security focused but lack the R&D. We’re successful because of our laser focus, 20 years of experience, and because we address security better than anybody else. Whereas some of these big players may be in one or two aspects of the market – McAfee is in the majority of them. Our success in D.C. based on is applying those advantages to the federal space in a unique manner. There is a lot of that directly translates from commercial to federal, but there is an equal amount that is unique. You’ve got to really understand the government perspective. In addition, I and a lot of my colleagues have had some level of DoD experience and therefore carry some level of security clearance.

ExecutiveBiz: From a business perspective, what areas are you looking to grow within the next year or so?

Tom Conway: We see security as really spreading amongst all of the devices that are connected to the Internet these days. Ten years ago, everybody went from desktop computers to notebook computers. Today, we’re heavy into the transition to mobile devices. Five or 10 years from now, you won’t ever touch your computer; everything is going to be your smartphone, if it isn’t already. And it raises a big challenge: How do we take that mobile productivity and make it secure in an enterprise manner? In addition, $20 billion in federal stimulus money that is starting to be spent on promoting electronic health records deployment in the U.S. How do you do that securely? That has a lot of very sensitive, very personal information. I understand why they want to automate. I want them to automate, because it is going to help contain costs, but I want them to do it in a secure way. I think protecting health IT, protecting critical infrastructure like the power grid to someone’s house is going to be the big task. How do we secure that? Those are all areas of threat potentially to someone who is trying to do us ill.

ExecutiveBiz: There is a lot of talk about doing more with less. How do you achieve that?

Tom Conway: That is one of the keys to security. We’ve seen a lot of companies dabble in security. You need to have a lot of different types of security, but your budget is not growing at the same level that the threat is and the agencies’ workforces are not growing that extent either. Start integrating what you have and as well as new technologies that you are bringing in. We are in all areas of the security market but are driving it all to a single-management console – whether you are managing your desktop, smartphone or protecting critical data in your infrastructure. You can control most, if not all, of that from a single pane of glass. This means you don’t need to train five people in five different management consoles. You can do it with one person. We helped DISA deploy the Host Based Security System for DoD – extending advanced security for five to seven millions of devices that are being controlled by very few places. They are really doing more with less by basically having fewer management layers and having the management layers that do have provide more breadth and coverage.