After two quarters of sitting on their annual budgets, companies around the world are likely to start investing in coming months in network management and efficiency tools that will better secure their businesses, a top analyst said yesterday.

This is good news for Israeli companies whose Internet and information security technologies are considered top of the line, such as Whale Communications, Sanctum, and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., as well as companies with Israeli R&D; such as Business Layers and BMC, said Steve Hunt, vice president and research director of Giga Information Group, a leading global IT advisory firm.

Hunt has advised VC funds and businesses to invest in Israeli technology, which he says lead the market along with US firms.

"Investing in Israeli companies and products is as good a decision today as it has ever been," said Hunt. "What the rest of the world doesn't understand is that Israel is built very strong, it is a viable country with a viable economy that is going through a rough time, but there is no impending doom."

"What we are seeing in the geopolitical climate is more of the same that Israel has dealt with for 50 years," he added, noting that the climate itself has contributed greatly to Israel's technological innovation.

"In the security area we see this in particular. The quality of the security solution coming from Israel is driven by the need for quality security solutions in Israel itself," said Hunt.

The terror attacks of September 11 spotlighted security technologies that has remained focused despite the quickly extinguished buying spike that followed the assault.

As the high tech industry heads into the second half of the year, companies who were reluctant to purchase anything in the first two quarters are now scrambling to make sense of their security systems and decide how best to invest to improve them, said Hunt.

"In the next two quarters we will see investment in a handful of significant technologies because they aid companies in becoming more efficient and effective in their security," predicted Hunt, a certified information systems security professional with 19 years of experience in physical, corporate, and information security.

Provisioning software that manages employees, customers, and their privileges through a "who are you and what you may do" system, as well as internal network management solutions that secure against rogue administrators, among other things, will have the biggest draw for companies up until the end of the year, said Hunt, adding that Israeli companies play a significant role in each sector.

Looking beyond the end of the year into the next decade, Hunt says that existing security architectures will not be sufficient to block the coming threats.

What that means, he said, is that there will be a growing demand for clever and elegant solutions to new challenges such as managing many users with multiple authentication credentials such as passwords, smart cards, and biometrics.

"Efficient authentication infrastructure is something that does not exist today and we are waiting for those solutions," he said. "I am sure Israel is working on that problem now."