Is Symantec Still An Antivirus Vendor?
Julie Parrish, Symantec' channel chief, says Symantec will release the latest version of Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition (v11) this summer. She promises that the release will "leapfrog past what Trend Micro and McAfee have."
The question is: Can Symantec wait that long?
"A bloated memory hog that breaks more applications than it protects" is how some solution providers and end users describe the current version of Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition. The performance and interoperability problems are so pervasive that solution providers report disabling the application and, in a growing number of cases, replacing it with a rival's protection.
Both Trend Micro and McAfee report taking customers and solution providers away from Symantec. They attribute their gains to a combination of problems, not the least being the performance of Symantec's issues. The problems with Symantec's recent migration to a new ERP system has made doing business with the vendor difficult. The quality of technical support has ebbed, some say. And its focus on storage products has some solution providers wondering if the security side of the house is even a priority.
"We're definitely taking advantage of that," says Nancy Reynolds, vice president of North America channel sales and marketing at Trend Micro.
While Symantec has slipped in antivirus, Trend Micro is seeing competitive displacement among large customers, tremendous opportunity among midsize companies and open-field prospects in the small business market.
David Dickison, senior vice president of North America channels at McAfee, echoes the Trend's trend.
"The growth of [Symantec'] organization is displacing what the customers need," he says. "The partners don't have as much loyalty as they once had."
He continues: "Symantec's diversifying outside the security space. They've made acquisitions that are substantial in scope. Ours have been more manageable and easier to integrate."
Parrish doesn't deny competitors are capitalizing on Symantec's pain, but won't provide specifics as to whether there are losses.
"We are not seeing any changes to our overall order flow, but we have heard about some partners switching orders. It is hard to know if the switch is permanent or whether they've switched and will come back," she says. While Symantec is silent on specifics for how it will improve Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition, both McAfee and Trend are vocal about their road maps.
McAfee plans to finally integrate its series of acquisitions into one risk management suite. As Dickison explains, ePolicy Orchestrator will be the umbrella under which Foundstone's vulnerability management application, Citidel's patch management software, Onigma's data loss prevention and IntruVert intrusion prevention technology will holistically reside.
Trend plans to incorporate reputation services it acquired from Kalkea into its security suite to identify and block hostile sources before they reach an organization's IT perimeter.
Parrish, a former Veritas executive, doesn't shirk the problems. She rattles off a laundry list of problems -- order processing too difficult, errors in license key activations, improving support quality -- that are either being fixed or a priority for immediate remediation. But she knows that Symantec must do better to communicate what it's doing to solution providers.
"We have a much improved AV product coming but, in the meantime, to say we're working on it isn't a good message," she says.
Missteps aside, Symantec is a solid company with one of the largest and most experienced channel programs in the business. Antivirus loyalty may not be what it was a few years ago, but a rip-and-replace of an enterprise-wide software deployment is something that few companies will do -- even when there are performance issues. As a company, Symantec remains a formidable competitor, and the fact that it has a sizable storage line makes it even more dangerous to competitors that only have a single-source revenue stream.
We may find out in June what Symantec has up its sleeve. But solution providers hope that the yellow-clad vendor wakes up and starts talking about what it's going to do for them and their customers in the meantime.
What are your experiences with Symantec? Has the antivirus market fundamentally changed? Let me know what you think.