First Agnitum’s antivirus Outpost Antivirus Pro is available

Yesterday, on March 18, 2008 we launched the standalone antivirus solution – Outpost Antivirus Pro (OAV) with extended functionality including antivirus, antispyware, proactive protection mechanisms and web control elements. By this release we rounded up our security solutions arsenal, and now provide both reactive and proactive defense for those seeking for separates security products and all-in-one protection fans.

What’s included in Outpost Antivirus Pro?

• Fast and efficient virus protection to keep your computer clean of malware
• Comprehensive anti-spyware to safeguard your personal data
• Secure digital safe to store your confidential information
• Host protection to stop zero-day threats
• URL blacklist to block malicious internet sites
• Self-protection to prevent unauthorized termination of your security

As you may judge by the features list, OAV is a proactive antivirus that inherited host protection and self-protection functionality from its big brother – Outpost Security Suite Pro 2008. Two antimalware labs (our partner’s analysts and the in-house team) are working to ensure latest virus and spyware updates, the most valuable factor in the antivirus industry.

What’s also special about Outpost Antivirus Pro is its price or rather the pricing model. Whereas an average AV vendor would set a higher complex price for the initial purchase (around $40) to cover its development and marketing expenses, Agnitum charges its customers just for the updates.

That is: with OAV you pay $19.95 at the first buy and for all following updates every year. We are not inclined to increase the price artificially as we didn’t create the product from scratch (but transferred existing functionality from OSS) and are not going to invest huge sums into advertising. Agnitum suggests the user pay for what really matters – daily database updates and support.

You can download the software at: http://www.agnitum.com/products/antivirus/download.php .

There’s an important note for those of you who prefer bundling standalone solutions. Outpost Antivirus should not be installed on a machine that’s already running Outpost Firewall Pro or Outpost Security Suite! Having two products on one machine will cause conflicts, as all the solutions contain host protection mechanisms that would be involved in a fight when used simultaneously. So let us deter you from such experiments.

However, being a user of Outpost Firewall Pro, you can upgrade to Outpost Security Suite that includes antivirus functionally with a 60% discount, click here for details.

Anyway, in case you already have Agnitum’s products installed and would like to somehow take advantage of Outpost Antivirus Pro despite the incompatibilities, there is going to be a special gift for you. You’ll find all the details in Agnitum’s March newsletter, so keep your eyes on: http://www.agnitum.com/news/agnitumnewsletter/index.php page or just subscribe to know the latest news.

Mikhail Penkovsky,

Global VP for Marketing and Sales,

Agnitum

Musings on anti-virus pricing

What do you think about the way anti-virus vendors price their offerings? We’ve been mulling over some ideas on this and would like to share them with you. Hopefully, you’ll have some thoughts to share with us as well.

Antivirus solutions have been on the market for around 20 years now and are pretty much a commodity item. Most people install one, “just to be safe”. Even most security suites seem to be built around anti-virus (although a few of us do build them around the firewall).

So what’s the difference between firewall protection and anti-virus protection? A firewall can function “as is” without any updates, it has preset functionality, a predefined set of measures to defend against intrusions, data leak and other threats. Anti-virus, on the other hand, is more based on the update principle and ensures effective protection as long as the virus definitions are kept up to date. Obviously, I don’t underestimate the value of scanning speed and accuracy, or, a convenient user interface, but the fact remains that it is the constant updates that characterize anti-virus most strongly in contrast with firewalls.

With this in mind, let’s look typical pricing for antivirus protection. When setting prices, vendors of course need to take their own cost basis into account. Those costs can be split into two major categories: development-related and promotion-related. Leaving development aside (we all have to do development, let’s face it), the real differential in spending comes into play with marketing. After all, no-one buys a product they’ve never heard of. So, millions are spent to tell you about these products. Who pays for this? Software manufacturers do, and – yes! – you do, too!

Imagine an equation: development expenses + promotion expenses + updates (antivirus services) = initial software price. If we assume that the typical initial price for an anti-virus product is $39.95, industry averages indicate that number is made up of $10 base development, $10 marketing, and $20 (give or take) on the research, implementation, testing, and distribution costs related to updates. So when you renew your anti-virus subscription, you’re typically paying around $20 a year for that ($30 if the company does *a lot* of marketing).

So my question is – since anti-virus is a commodity and thus most of the initial development costs were amortized years ago, why are vendors still charging as if they wrote the software last week?

Looking forward to your thoughts!

Mikhail Penkovsky,

Global VP for Marketing and Sales,

Agnitum Ltd.