Johannesburg, 26 Sep 2008
Symantec has unveiled Norton AntiVirus 2009, promising to improve on performance shortcomings made in its previous products.
This announcement was made at the Theatre on the Track, in Midrand.
John Leahy, regional sales manager for Symantec Europe, Middle East and Africa, says the focus for 2009 is all about performance, smart security and customer experience.
Leahy says Symantec is the fourth-largest software company in the world and scans a third of the world's e-mail on a daily basis. The company has 25 support centres around the world and gets feedback from 20 million clients on a daily basis.
Con Mallon, consumer product director for Europe, Middle East and Africa, says in 1988 there were only two viruses, and now in 2008 the industry is seeing thousands of new viruses emerging on a daily basis. Internet security software is too cumbersome and negatively impacts performance speed, Mallon says.
"We've received feedback from our customers of our products being too slow. So customers switch off the product, and that's when they become targets to malware. This was particularly found with gamers. Norton 2009 is fundamentally new architecture. We've spent 500 000 man-hours of development time on this project.
"Through research, we've found that 40% of our customers have less than 512MB." Mallon says this is a small amount. The market has become accustomed to a mindset that if they want better security then they have to sacrifice performance, he adds. Software is now being streamed directly into the system, giving a 30-second install time. "This year, we are handing back CPU speed to our customers.
"Our key innovation this year is Norton Insight," says Mallon. "Given the sheer amount of malware out there, we need to find new security techniques and technologies and to re-learn the way security is done to keep up with the dramatic explosion of malware. With new technology and through the Wisdom of Crowds, this could be the end of traditional scanning as we know it."
Mallon illustrated that Norton 2009 monitors and displays CPU speed and the amount of performance that the product consumes, which Mallon says is small.
"Norton 2009 is not another iteration of a product. We are doing something radically different. Norton 2009 is the smallest sized security product on the market, it has the fastest automatic scanning, fast start-up and zero disruption."
Norton 2009 uses 7MB of RAM and automatically scans in the background with a function to suspend non-critical tasks and alerts, to avoid interruptions. Streaming updates every five to 15 minutes, and Real-time Sonar Technology (Symantec Online Network for Advanced Response) detects emerging viruses without the need for traditional updates or signature-based definitions.
In addition, Norton offers free technical support 24 hours a day, as well as live chat with remote access technology.
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