(FORTUNE Magazine) – hq: san francisco and ramatgan, israel founded: 1993 sales: $83 million employees: 400 stock: chkpf; nasdaq web address: www.checkpoint.com

When Check Point Software Technologies CEO Deb Triant first met the company's Israeli founders in their offices in Ramat-Gan three years ago, she says she thought, "These kids are geniuses." Gil Shwed, Shlomo Kramer, and Marius Nacht had designed a piece of network-security software--what's known as a firewall--entirely different from any other. In a business where work was typically done by ex-government cloak-and-dagger types who would tinker away for weeks custom-building complicated and obscure firewalls for corporate and government customers, Check Point had designed a shrink-wrapped product--called FireWall-1--to suit the needs of lots of customers. The old guard of the network-security industry looked at the trio and decided they must be crazy.

Triant, however, had spent time in the early 1970s as a flower child in a commune in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. She understood the importance of being different. "They [Shwed, Kramer, and Nacht] were anticipating a future no one else saw," says Triant, a former vice president of marketing at Adobe Systems. Their vision: Companies constructing intranets would need something adaptable like Firewall-1 to secure all the different data that pass through their widely dispersed networks. That may seem obvious now, but way back in 1993 the word "intranet" had yet to be coined. Nonetheless, Triant quit Adobe to set up Check Point's U.S. subsidiary in Silicon Valley.

Good move. FireWall-1 is now the biggest brand in security software. Check Point holds about 35% of the firewall market, almost four times the share of its nearest competitor. Marketing through a network of 15 enterprise partners, including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and 3Com, which bundle FireWall-1 with their products, Triant has pushed up revenues and earnings. In 1995, sales were $10 million, profits $5 million; last year, sales were $83 million, with profits of $42 million. Triant's stock options are now worth $50 million.

She'll have to work hard to make them worth more. While the market for corporate security systems has ballooned from $305 million in 1995 to an estimated $2.4 billion this year, according to UBS Securities, big players like Cisco and Network Associates have come after Check Point. Many observers think firewalls are exactly the kind of application Microsoft will integrate into Windows NT, its operating system for networks. Indeed, in March, Bill Gates' right-hand man, Steve Ballmer, made comments that suggested that Microsoft would compete rather than partner with Check Point. The share price has tumbled since then, dropping 30% even though Microsoft has expanded the companies' existing partnership. Says Triant of the prospective competition: "I feel like we've been living among an elephant herd."

An avid horsewoman, Triant says Check Point will adapt its technology so that it will do more than just provide security. She'd like to have small businesses, for example, use Check Point's software to manage data traffic on their small networks. "We will never run with the pack," she says. But she'll have to gallop to avoid getting trampled by this herd.

--Melanie Warner