SAN FRANCISCO — VMware is now a $1 billion security company, but it’s aiming much higher, said COO Sanjay Poonen in an interview at RSA Conference.

“We see a tremendous opportunity to create a multi-billion-dollar security company,” he said. “And we have a starting point of a billion, so that’s a really good place to start.”

And VMware’s security story isn’t just about buying Carbon Black, Poonen added. “We’ve been building for over the course of the last seven years now a network security business on top of NSX,” he said. “That’s where it started.”

NSX is VMware’s networking platform that it built after acquiring Nicira and its virtualization technology for $1.26 billion in 2012. Network security quickly became a top NSX use case because of its microsegmentation capabilities. Microsegmentation enables fine-grained security policies to be assigned to cloud and data center applications. The approach integrates network security directly into a virtualized workload, and it reduces a company’s attack surface by essentially sealing off workloads from the rest of the network, thus preventing hackers from gaining access to the wider system.

Over the years VMware has added other security features on top of its NSX platform including an internal firewall that it debuted at last year’s RSA event. Earlier this week VMware announced a new capability of the NSX Service-defined Firewall, which provides intrusion detection across the different services that make up an application, thus making it easier to get deep visibility. It also this week rolled out load balancer and web application firewall capabilities acquired from Avi Networks.

“So NSX is a robust, network security platform for everything from data centers switching to firewalls,” Poonen said, adding that VMware is now stealing market share from other security vendors because of NSX. “Customers are reducing their spend on Palto Alto, Checkpoint, and Fortinet, and building on firewall capabilities with NSX,” he said. “We can now do load balancing capabilities and displace the need for F5. We do SD-WAN, and we’re very well competing with Cisco. So that network security opportunity has become a sizable part of that $1 billion.”

The other major part of VMware’s security business involves endpoint and workload security. This includes its Workspace One device management platform it acquired from Airwatch, and more recently Carbon Black. Also this week VMware announced that Carbon Black’s workload protection technology no longer requires installing an agent to provide antivirus protection or endpoint detection and response.

And there will be more to come in terms of deeper integrations with Carbon Black’s technology, Poonen said. “We can fuse Carbon Black and Workspace One into a unified agent,” he said. “That’s never been done before. And immediately you reduce this need for 15 agents running on laptops to one unified agent. When we do that we will shake up the client side completely. Because you'd have to be putting together ... System Center and Mobile Iron and CrowdStrike and Symantec and McAfee and tenable and it's just a huge mess to do that.”

VMware identified five areas of security “that we really care about,” Poonen said. These are network, endpoint, identity, cloud, and analytics. “We have a really strong strategy around network and endpoint,” he added. “And we’ve got some assets and partnerships in the others.”

For cloud security, VMware has a multi-cloud security product called Secure State. It’s based on technology that VMware acquired when it bought public cloud security startup CloudCoreo last year. And then it also partners with companies like Zscaler on secure web gateway. Similarly, VMware partners with Okta on identity management, and Splunk, Exabeam, IBM, and Sumo Logic on security analytics.

“So we picked a group of more strategic security vendors that we’re not going to compete with,” Poonen said. “We are absolutely going to compete with Cisco and Palo Alto and F5 and Netscaler and Symantec and McAfee and Trend Micro and CrowdStrike — no issues. We have to build a better product.”

VMware might expand into some of these other security areas down the road, but for now its focus remains on network and endpoint/workload. “And if we do that well, we’ll discover in five years the next area we should go into,” Poonen said. “And by that point the security business of VMware will be more than $1 billion. It will be multi-billion.”