This week Trend Micro and eSoft plan to unveil products aimed at helping customers combat spyware. Trend Micro's focus will be on desktops and servers, while eSoft's will be on appliance-based gateway filtering of spyware.

Trend Micro's Anti-Spyware Enterprise Edition provides protection for organizations with at least 500 users. The company, which acquired anti-spyware vendor InterMute in the spring, has extended the consumer-based software to protect Windows-based clients and servers.

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Anti-Spyware Enterprise Edition retains the search and eradication methods InterMute developed to wipe out the hard-to-find CoolWebSearch spyware, which has about 50 variants today that can hijack Web browsers.

The software, which costs $11.55 per user, is managed via Trend Micro's Control Manager console, which discovers client machines and pushes agents to desktops. It is designed to run desktop scans against many types of spyware without hogging computing resources, says Bob Hansmann, senior product manager.

"It's called trickle-scan, and it's a process to scan periodically when computing resources are available so there's no performance problem with applications," he says. Before acquiring InterMute, Trend Micro added its own anti-spyware filtering to its InterScan content-filtering gateway and its OfficeScan anti-virus, anti-spam product line.

Separately, eSoft announced it has added anti-spyware protection to its InstaGate firewall/VPN line for small-to-midsize business customers. The InstaGate line also provides anti-spam, anti-virus and Web access controls through additional modules.

The anti-spyware engine that InstaGate uses is adapted from technology provided by partner Aluria that will provide spyware-protection updates on a regular basis, says Scott Lukes, vice president of marketing.

Tim Taylor, IT manager at Golden, Colo.-based Good Times Restaurant, says he's beta-testing the anti-spyware protection in the InstaGate appliance for Internet-based content filtering deployed at the restaurant chain's headquarters.

Spyware appears to be the source of many problems with the office's desktop computers, Taylor says. "It gets hold of the computer, and pulls up pornography and gambling Web sites," he says. "It makes the PC have a hard time functioning."