If anti-virus vendor Kaspersky Lab were any more bullish right now it would be growing a pair of horns and a dislike of the colour red. At its annual press gathering in Moscow, around 30 of my esteemed counterparts in the international press - from Japan to Australia, South Africa to Argentina - were told that the firm has Symantec and McAfee firmly in its sights. In fact, COO Eugene Buyakin even went so far as to say it would be number one in the endpoint security market sooner or later.

And then chief executive Eugene Kaspersky left us in no doubt about why this will happen (despite the fact that it is actually more likely never to happen, according to most of the journalists I have spoken to here). It's because of the firm's relentless focus on R&D, on sourcing the best engineers and ploughing truckloads of rubles into innovation. Time and again we were told how Kaspersky predicted, unlike its rivals, that the security market would be lead by innovators, by those firms which seek to invest the most in technology to protect their customers.

It's actually quite refreshing to see a software vendor so unequivocally pronouncing itself utterly brilliant. Kaspersky said he doesn't recognise the current financial crisis because his firm's doing pretty well, thank you very much, although when asked exactly how much the company was worth, he replied a little more coyly: "Enough to throw you all a good party tonight". The figures don't lie though - they're forecasting year-on-year revenue growth of 100 per cent to $270m in 2008. So what is driving this rapid growth - is it the technology or just good PR and an enthusiastic and loyal partner network?

Well, we did get some answers. Kaspersky is certainly trying to move beyond traditional AV by providing products which incorporate user-community driven white- and blacklisting, alongside static and dynamic application analysis, vulnerability scanning, behavioural analysis and in-the-cloud protection. The latter is all about harnessing the internet and the power of its customer base to detect if an application should be allowed to run or not and react in real-time to new threats.

It's a big step up from the old paradigm of pushing out AV signature updates to users, sometimes hours after the virus has been discovered. But it's something Kaspersky's rivals are also either doing or thinking about. Trend Micro is a big proponent of in-the-cloud protection systems and you can be sure that other players in the space will add this string to their bows at some point.

So is the fact that they're at the forefront of technological innovation enough to make a dent in Symantec's and McAfee's market share?

Well, Kaspersky has admitted it needs to focus more on the corporate market and may find it difficult to persuade the risk-averse CSO to abandon his investments with the big two and go with the little Russian dynamo. But with further developments of Kaspersky's corporate offering including enhanced heuristic and emulation technologies and new ways of detecting malware based on similarity techniques, it will certainly be interesting to see the vendor try.