AIRSHOW-Raytheon sees cybersecurity as major growth area

* Customers include 6 of top 10 Fortune 500 companies
* Growing market fueled by security concerns
By Andrea Shalal-Esa
PARIS, June 18 (Reuters) - Raytheon Co (RTN.N), the sixth-largest U.S. defense contractor, predicts double-digit growth in a cybersecurity market worth billions and says its high-end products and services will take on increasing importance in generating sales for the company.
"It is a significant focus area for the corporation," said Steven Hawkins, vice president for information security solutions for Raytheon's intelligence and information systems business. "It is one of the major growth areas for us."
Cybersecurity is currently a small to medium-sized product line, one of six offered by Raytheon's intelligence and information business, which generated $3 billion in sales last year. But it will be one of the larger ones within five years, Hawkins told Reuters in an interview at the Paris Air Show.
Big U.S. defense contractors are highlighting cybersecurity as a growth area at a time when U.S. defense spending is expected to level off.
President Barack Obama said last month that he would name a cybersecurity czar to coordinate government efforts to fight an epidemic of cybercrime. Hackers have already penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and have stolen intellectual property, corporate secrets and money.
Hawkins said Raytheon was well-positioned to be a major player in the market due to decades of work on the most sensitive defense and intelligence projects, plus three targeted acquisitions.
Raytheon already sells to six of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies, and its laptop and desktop monitoring products have become the standard for all the major defense and intelligence agencies, and are now being adopted by other federal agencies.
Hawkins, pitching Raytheon's cybersecurity work at the Paris Air Show, said there was also growing interest from foreign countries and several U.S. allies planned to adopt the monitoring system.
"The whole strategy is to be able to offer an end-to-end solution," he said. "Some of it we had organically, some of it we acquired, some of it we partnered. A lot of it we're investing R&D dollars in."
Raytheon also provides companies and government agencies with products that help them assess their vulnerability to hackers and other cyberattacks, and helps agencies ensure that they can safely share data across varying security levels.
Hawkins said estimates of the size of the overall cybersecurity market varied, but it was certainly worth billions of dollars. "It's a lot of money," he said.
Raytheon created a separate cybersecurity business about three years ago, the first in the defense industry to do so. Hawkins said.
That decision grew out of the company's experience in securing its own networks, and the complex software used to protect the weapons it builds for the U.S. government, he said.
"There was a recognition that this was going to be a defense needs and that we should do something about it," Hawkins said. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)