Symantec Corporation, best known for its Norton range of
security and utility products, will establish a liaison office in India before September.
The move is necessitated to support a new corporate product--the Digital Immune System
(DIS)--that the company will launch in September.
Symantec's liaison office will be located in Mumbai and
will house sales and support staff. "We are recruiting staff and looking for space at
the moment. We will have five staff by year-end. The office will become operational as
soon as we appoint a country head," revealed Kerrie-Anne Turner, Sales and Marketing
Manager, South East Asia, Symantec.
The office will provide service and support to corporate
DIS clients. "The DIS is an environment where corporations can, like an immune
system, contain viruses and protect themselves against viruses in the most efficient way
possible. It is a collection of best of breed applications that can be installed and
managed from a single console," explained Ligh Costin. The company claims that the
DIS offers the lowest total cost of ownership for an anti virus solution, translating into
a reduction in real cost from between $50,000 to $500,000 per year. The DIS is an amalgam
of Symantec's own products and anti virus technologies that the company acquired from IBM
and Intel. In May 1998, Symantec licensed IBM's immune system technology and in September
purchased Intel's anti virus business and licensed Intel's systems management technology
with a view to combine them with its own products.
The DIS will be launched in a phased manner. Version 1.0
will be launched in September and will essentially be a managed anti virus solution built
on top of Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition. It will address the core virus threat. The
first version will run on DOS, all flavors of MS Windows including the yet to be released
Windows 2000 and Novell. The second version, scheduled to be available in the first half
of 2000, will include pcANYWHERE for remote connectivity and disk utilities like Speed
Disk and Norton Ghost. In addition, a version will be offered on the Tivoli enterprise
system management platform.
The company will charge for DIS on a per-seat license
basis. Apart from setting up the liaison office, Symantec is building and educating its
channel network in anticipation of the launch.