Beating out McAfee, Trend Micro has landed a deal with Microsoft’s MSN Hotmail service to do anti-virus scanning for 187 million e-mail accounts.
Under the agreement, announced Monday, Trend’s anti-virus technology will scan inbound and outbound e-mail attachments for viruses, worms and Trojan horse programs. McAfee had provided antivirus scanning for MSN customers at least since 2000, when the company announced a 2-year agreement with Microsoft to protect Hotmail e-mail accounts.
McAfee was able to respond to requests for comment in time for this story.
Trend is based in Tokyo and has U.S. headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The company makes the PC-cillin desktop anti-virus and content security products, including PC-cillin Internet Security, a suite of anti-virus, firewall, anti-spam and content-filtering products.
The company could not comment on the criteria MSN used to select its product for Hotmail, or on the size of the deal, citing instructions from Microsoft, according to Michael Sweeny, a Trend spokesman.
Trend has long been the number-three anti-virus software provider, behind Symantec and McAfee. The company’s products accounted for 14.2% of the worldwide revenue generated by anti-virus software sales in 2003, according to research firm IDC.
Sales to corporations have always been Trend’s strong suit. The company’s products accounted for 16.9% of the revenue generated by anti-virus software sales to corporations in 2003. Symantec had 28.5% of that market, and McAfee 23.9%, in the same year. In comparison, Trend accounted for just 8.1% of revenue generated by anti-virus software sales to consumers, compared with 12.8% for McAfee and a whopping 67.6% for Symantec in 2003, according to IDC.
The deal with MSN could boost Trend’s share of the consumer anti-virus market.
The deal will help expose millions of consumers to Trend’s products and technology, according to a statement from Steve Chang, chairman and founder of Trend.
“We’ll have our name posted (on MSN). Part of the benefit to us is that we can … show off our technology in the antivirus space to consumers,” Sweeny said.
Trend is already the top consumer antivirus product in Japan, but in the past the company has resisted going head-to-head with Symantec and McAfee in North America, Minocha said.
“Hopefully, (the deal with MSN) is a sign of more things to come in the U.S.,” he said.
The announcement is also more bad news for McAfee, which lost ground in both the home and corporate antivirus market in 2003, mostly to Symantec and Trend. McAfee’s worldwide anti-virus software revenue declined 7.1% between 2002 and 2003, according to IDC. During the same period, Symantec’s anti-virus revenue jumped by 36% and Trend’s by 22%, IDC said.
