Coviello is also banking on strong growth in demand for consumer facing "adaptive authentication" technology that RSA acquired from Cyota (Findit/4311) in December, 2005, and PassMark Security in April (Findit/4312).

That business has been growing at about 100 percent annually, from $11 million last year to around $30 million this year, and Coviello expects that growth trend to continue for a least a couple more years, as banks and other financial institutions get in line with guidance from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) to beef up user protections in online banking portals (Findit/4756).

Coviello is also looking to expand the value of those acquisitions with offerings like a risk assessment service that could be sold to banks and financial services companies and that leverages the phishing and online crime intelligence collected by RSA's Cyota team in Israel. RSA researchers are also working on applying fraud intelligence, like that used by Cyota, to data flows within an organization in an effort to spot anomalies that may reveal insider threats, Coviello said.

But the former CEO said he's seeing opportunity everywhere these days, as the EMC name opens doors that were previously shut to accounts across verticals, but especially in banking and financial services. Executives who saw RSA as a secure token vendor a year ago now see the company's technology as a strategic investment, when coupled with EMC, he said.

Those accounts were hard to win before EMC entered the picture, and Coviello admitted that RSA's PassMark acquisition was more about getting a foot in at major financial institutions like Bank of America than about the PassMark technology.