Avast is most probably one of the leading antivirus companies, which has earned its industry reputation in a very short span of time. Now, India has been their one of the most prime target market. We recently spoke to James Norris, CEO, Avosec Pvt. Ltd., to undrstand their strategy and vision for Indian market.

James Norris, CEO, Avosec Pvt. Ltd

Q1) How is Avast positioned today in Indian antivirus market?

There are several measures that could be applied to answer this questions.  Certainly, since avast! has only recently appointed the local Distributor, the sales market share would not be optimal measure of the presence.  Plus, avast! strategy is to penetrate each market first with the free antivirus version to establish brand presence.  At the end of 2009 avast! free antivirus was used by 1,5 mio Indians.  That means approximatelly 10% share of the households with PC and access to internet.   At the present rate of growth, at end of 2010 it will be 20% market share.     The brand presence in a given market could also be well measured by its visibility on Google.    avast! brand is today the most searched brand on Google (see Google trends). 

Q2) How does Avast evaluate Indian antivirus market?

The exact statistics on the size and dynamics are not easy to get.  Hopefully, with the soon starting national census there will  be more data available.
In general terms – and as is visible from the chart above – the Indian market is fragmented with many active brands trying to establish presence and some – especially Symantec and AVG – losing the visibility.

Q3) How can Avast claim its solutions unique in comparison of others in market?

The avast! security offering is certainly not unique.   Yes, avast! does offer several very unique technologies / features (32 and 64 virtualization,  on-access detection of installed rootkits,  multithreading, and others. However, it is the general strategy that makes avast! unique.

avast! believes that even the free protection has to be good and user of free version need to be well protected – and not just used to be offered a paid version to buy...   In line with this strategy, avast! offers its FREE version to the independed  testing labs and certification authorities – such as AV Comparatives, VB100 and others – for certification and comparative testing.  As confirmed by those tests,  the avast! free version delivers the same or better antivirus and antispyware protection compared to the paid versions of the competition. This approach gives avast! great level of word-of-mouth advertising.    68% of all avast! users use the product because it was recommended to them. Note: globally, avast! doesn’t spend and cost on advertising!   Furthermore, avast! users help us in many ways.   They help each other on the help forum, they localize the software into many langauges, they serve as good soundboard for innovation ideas and last but not least they help us in early detection of new viruses (the avast! CommunityIQ system)

In short,  for us the  well protected and satisfied user is better than „paying“ user.   We believe that loyal, satisfied user will in the long run be the decisive factor for market success.  That is why avast! offers the free version right on the home page of www.avast.com.   Try to find the free version – they call it the basic (!) – of Avira on www.avira.com or also of AVG on www.avg.com.   Avira and AVG don’t  make the free product available on their websites to maximise the revenue from inbound traffic – even though this approach irritates the users searching for the free version.

Q4) What is CommunityIQ and how does Avast use this for further product development?

Any antivirus brand needs to solve how to protect its users against the latest virus threats – the zero day / zero hour threats.   The most exact appraoch is to use the virus signatures.  Of course that means a delay in finding the virus sample and providing the virus database update.   The other approach is to depend on behaviour detection or similar techniques – which however brings the issue of higher probability of false positives (in some cases up to 10%!)    

Avast! users could at install opt to participate in our avast! CommunityIQ which is a system that sends back to our Virus Lab any suspicious sample the user encounters.  (Note: most of the new viruses are spreading via web these days)  In a typical situation, the user would be visiting his popular website and the avast! Behaviour Shield would identify a new sample that is behaving in a suspicious manner.    It would automatically deliver the necessary information to avast! Virus Lab for further analysis.   If the sample proves to be a virus, it will be added to the signature base and made available to all users immediately.      Since the 100 mio avast users visit all relevant sites in any country in much better fashion than any pre-programmed crawler ever could, and since the system avoids false positives though thourough analysis in the Virus lab – it could be said that the users provide zero-day-threat protection to themselves.   Note:  at given month avast! virus lab receives 1 billion such user avast! CommuntiyIQ reports!

Q5) Does Avast see any major and significant shift in security industry in near future?

The trend of current several years of increasing criminilazition of the attacks with the intent to steal money will certainly continue.

Q6) How internet security forensics data can be help of internet users and what is Avast's take on this?

As in other areas... information is the key.    For avast! users the well documenting example is the use of avast! CommunityIQ.   Aside of reporting the virus –or potential virus – the system delivers other information about the sample – such as what website was the sample found on.  If the website is illegal – meaning it serves no other purpose than spreading of malware to redirected traffic – the website is added to blocked-website database and completelly prevented to all other potential visitors.   It is a common practice of the the cyber squatters to set up a China registered fake websites....   Avast users would be protected against those.    In case of infection of legitimate website, avast works with administrators to try to clean the infections from spreading.   Recently, avast! identified virus infecting all major web advertising networks (read the avast blog post: http://blog.avast.com/2010/02/18/ads-poisoning-%E2%80%93-jsprontexi/ )

Q7) Selling fake AV products is one of the most recent socially-engineered scams and has become very popular. How does Avast address this challenge?

In many cases those would fall into the illegal  category of blocked websites as described in point 7 and prevented for access to avast users.  Nevertheless,  more genaral approach is to build step by step the brand awareness of avast brand itself.   Users who know the brand will simply visit www.avast.com – and download the free version there.  However, the industry is still very young.  Everybody would be able to name several brands of cars and desribe them.  Many internet users don’t even know what protection they have installed...

Q8) What is Avast's vision for Indian market?

In terms of nominal GDP, India is today 11th biggest economy in the world.   With the economical improvement more and more households and busiensses will have access to internet, connect to the world, communicate, purchase online and run their bank affairs online.  Our vision is to continue to provide best security solutions to protect our users in this on-line World – regardless whether they use the free solution at home or the commercial solution in business environment.