In a wide-ranging discussion with reporters over dinner in Boston on Wednesday, Coviello, the charismatic chief of RSA for more than a decade, said that he expects to stay on at EMC for at least the next few years, as he makes good on a promise to EMC CEO Joe Tucci to grow RSA into a $1 billion a year company by 2009.

Tight integration with EMC's product line is a key element of that plan, such as embedding RSA's access management technology into EMC's Documentum content management system.

"Customers are craving integrated solutions," he said.

EMC pushed RSA along towards meeting that goal by acquiring security event management vendor Network Intelligence on the same day that it closed its acquisition of RSA. Together with RSA's traditional strength in data encryption, the Network Intelligence software will be a key element of the EMC Common Security Platform, which will integrate core services authentication, auditing and authorization across EMC's product line.

That would have been beyond the means of RSA, which reported total revenue of $181 million through the first half of 2006, especially after the Cyota and PassMark acquisitions. Network Intelligence will add around $20 million in revenue to the RSA division's bottom line this year, and double that next year, Coviello said.