We don't react to our competitors' pricing

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