How important is the Indian market for Symantec?
FREER: I consider Indian market to result in the highest growth. We are the leaders here and we want to remain the leaders. We've seen that India has the largest number of customers whose systems are unprotected. The percentage of such users being 33 percent of the world users. The silver lining is that at least two-third of the users are protected. But we found that these people have either not paid their subscription, are using freeware or use a product that has not been updated since an year or two at times. This can only do one thing-that they are protecting themselves from older spyware and viruses. Considering these circumstances and scenarios, India has become a big focus for us.

Do you think the lack of protection is due to a low awareness level or the price-factor?
FREER: I think that the lack of protection is certainly due to low awareness. And this holds true for every country where we have tried to, and more often than ever, established our company. Pricing is a different issue altogether. Every country has people who are price conscious, but when one matches the risk versus the reward, one usually makes a quick and sensible decision. If a user buys an ultra-cheap product, the question which hovers over his mind is “Am I truly being protected?”

Our aim is that our customers are protected from viruses and spywares as soon as possible. The challenge is to reduce the gap between the time when the threat is identified and the time when the crisis is averted. For the launch of Norton 2010, we have looked at our pricing; it has been reduced keeping in mind the price-conscious Indian and other Asian customers.

How is Norton 2010 different from other security offerings?
HALL: We came up with a new model for security, which doesn't replace any of our existing security technologies, but instead compliments them. It is based on building up a reputation of the file even before running it. It is called Quorum. We have started making this for every file that we've been working on. It has been over three years now since we have practiced this. And I can comfortably reveal that we've been building up the reputation of all these files. We now know about 67 million such files exist.

David Freer VP-Consumer Business APAC and Japan, Symantec	David Hall APAC Consumer Product Marketing Manager, Symantec

Earlier, the trend was that a good security usually came at the cost of performance. We have now worked to break that paradigm. Our 2009 products were awarded the fastest in the industry. We brought the installation time down to one minute and memory to 10MB. This was done just to present a security product that did not compromise the performance of the system.

What factors build the reputation of a file?
HALL: The questions that can build reputation are as follows: How old is the file? Has it ever been seen before? From which website did it originate? Has it been trying to do anything suspicious? In an attempt to answer these questions, we have been able to automatically create a reputation score. This means that we can now stop new malware without having ever seen it before or having run it.

Quite a few vendors have reduced the price of their anti-virus products. What is Symantec's stance on this strategy?
FREER: We don't tend to react to our competitors' pricing. We set a price point to reflect what we think is an appropriate value for the protection and performance of the product.

I know some of our competitors are getting extremely competitive with pricing, but I can tell you that they eventually had to bring the prices back up. And it's not because of the Indian market but because it's being gray marketed out there. Since it's an English-speaking product and can be shipped around, it's lucrative for entrepreneurs.

But you have to look at the bigger channel strategy too, because it's one thing to have an ultra cheap product, but it's another if it's destroying your US, UK and Australian market.

There are a number of vendors offering low-cost/security freeware. Do you see this as a challenge?
FREER: While it is good as it shows that there is awareness among consumers, there is also a flip side to it. These products are protecting the PC from threats that are five years old, so they build a false sense of security. Cybercriminals have already worked out how to get past Microsoft's Security Essentials. They are just using signatures, which make the product obsolete.

Freeware protects the user from viruses and spywares, which accounts for less than 20 percent of the attacks today. 80 percent attacks happen when viruses infect when the user visits certain websites. No freeware has a chance to protect a user, when this happens.

Is Symantec doing anything in the security-as-a-software space in India?
FREER: We are doing a lot, particularly for our small business and enterprise customers. We've have recently bought a company called Message Labs, which deals with such issues. However, as of now, we are providing these services in the mature markets. We don't have a plan to get it here yet. I think we have some basic stuff to do here first.

Ruth Samson
ruths@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1