Choices in desktop anti-spyware protection this week are widening with Aluria Software moving from the consumer market into the corporate realm and Trend Micro announcing its product entry.
Aluria this week is expected to announce Paladin, anti-spyware software for Windows that is managed via Windows 2003-based server software for reporting purposes, as well as distributing new anti-spyware signatures.
Also: Face-off – Is the desktop the best place to stop spyware?
Aluria enters an increasingly crowded market, where Computer Associates, McAfee, Webroot Software and others offer corporate anti-spyware products, distinguished from their consumer counterparts primarily by centralized management.
Aluria’s anti-spyware package is provided free to AOL subscribers and has gained a few corporate customers, including BankOne, the District of Columbia Clerk of County Courts and the University of Wisconsin. Paladin can manage up to 80,000 desktops, the company says.
In addition, Aluria says it is developing another product to improve remote management of desktops across diverse locales. This next version, whose shipping date is not yet announced, will let one Paladin server communicate directly with another for purposes of reporting and signature distribution, says the company.
Meanwhile, anti-virus vendor Trend Micro, which last month acquired anti-spyware firm InterMute, has detailed an anti-spyware product road map for the consumer, small to midsize business (SMB) and enterprise markets.
Trend Micro later this month is expected to make available Anti-Spyware 3.0, a consumer product for detecting adware, keyloggers and other monitoring software that InterMute had under development, says general manager Ed English.
For the corporate market, Trend plans to offer Anti-Spyware for Small and Medium Businesses 3.0, which can centrally manage up to 1,000 Windows-based desktops.
In August, Trend Micro plans to ship Anti-Spyware Enterprise Edition, which will support a more mixed computing environment of more than 1,000 desktops and servers, according to English. By year-end, Trend Micro plans to integrate the anti-virus and anti-spyware management under a common framework.
One of InterMute’s strengths is the ability to detect and erase a hard-to-remove piece of adware known as Cool Web Search (CWS), Trend Micro says.
Anti-spyware vendor Webroot, which publishes a quarterly spyware/adware report, recently named CWS as the most successfully distributed adware for the first quarter of 2005.
Chris Deason, network manager at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, says the prevalence with which his 1,800 users pick up CWS – and the extreme difficulty in trying to uninstall it – was a factor in the hospital’s decision to buy anti-spyware software.
“CWS and other types of adware eat up resources and CPU, and they show pop-up windows,” Deason says, adding that the spyware/adware menace poses serious privacy and security concerns to an organization such as a hospital.
The hospital earlier this year deployed the InterMute desktop software after testing about 20 products, most of them lacking centralized management.
Deason said she plans to migrate to the Trend Micro enterprise product later this year, even though it will mean uninstalling the desktop anti-spyware software already in place.
The Alaska Native Medical Center, which has long used anti-virus software from McAfee and Kaspersky Labs, plans to continue the strategy of keeping its anti-virus and anti-spyware purchases with separate vendors. “I just don’t want to rely on one vendor for all of this,” Deason says.
This question of whether customers prefer to stick with their anti-virus vendor for an anti-spyware product or go a separate path is one that hangs over the anti-virus vendors, most of whom have only recently entered the anti-spyware software market, as Symantec did in April.
Trend Micro says the approach Trend is taking is to offer both stand-alone anti-spyware products and ones integrated with anti-virus software scanning and other content filtering. “We’ll have integrated products with anti-virus by the end of the year,” says Lane Bess, president of Trend Micro’s North American operations.
Pricing for Aluria’s Paladin is about $40 per seat, with discounts based on volume. Trend Micro’s SMB anti-spyware software is $5.25 for up to 1,000 users. Pricing for the enterprise version hasn’t been set.
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