* What are Microsoft's plans for Sybari's anti-virus, anti-spam tools?
Last week, Microsoft announced the purchase of Sybari Software, a privately held anti-virus, anti-spam company. This, evidently, created quite a stir in the anti-virus community.
Gartner analysts, in a written comment of the announcement, said: “Microsoft’s entry into this market will challenge anti-virus vendors such as Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro, which derive substantial revenue from upselling enterprises to anti-virus product suites that include desktops and servers…” (https://www3.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=126258).
Somehow this acquisition was much more important than the 2003 purchase of Romania’s GeCAD (a potent competitor to Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro – at least in Europe) and last December’s purchase of Giant Company and its anti-spam tools.
The ruckus seems to derive from the fact that Sybari has an “engine” which enables other tools to be plugged in to servers (such as Exchange Server) to do the actual anti-spam, anti-virus filtering. Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro have no such tool – but can be used in conjunction with Sybari’s.
The thought, from deep-thinking analysts, is that Microsoft will use the Sybari engine to implement the GeCAD and Giant Company tools in Microsoft products. But think about it for just a moment folks:
1) Microsoft doesn’t need an enabling engine – it owns the source code.
2) Implementing the enabling engine also enables Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro to hook into it.
Better thinkers feel that Redmond will use the engine as a shortcut method of including good anti-spam and anti-virus services in the next version of Windows. But this is done at some risk, the risk that users will prefer Symantec’s, McAfee’s, Trend Micro’s or other vendors’ products to a 1.0 release from Redmond.
Still, you may already know more about this. Bill Gates is scheduled to deliver a keynote address called “Security: Raising the Bar” at the RSA Conference in San Francisco (I’m writing this newsletter before his keynote on Tuesday Feb. 15). It’s thought he may incorporate the roadmap for the Sybari acquisition and how it will be worked into Windows. I’ll let you know my thoughts on that next week, but you can start forming your own opinion now; just follow the breaking news in Network World (https://www.nwfusion.com/news/netflash.html).
For now, though, I think all the agitation about this acquisition is simply a tempest in a teapot.
