Symantec response to Microsoft Sybari acquisition

Wed, 9 Feb 2005

Symantec response to Microsoft Sybari acquisition

As you know, Microsoft today announced their acquisition of Sybari Software. We would like to put that into context for you.

While Sybari sells antivirus and antispam products, the company does not own its core scanning technologies and backend response infrastructure for either antivirus or antispam, but has relied on the use of 3rd-party vendor scanning engines. In other words, they only provide the plumbing that enables engine integrations with Microsoft Exchange and other gateway products, but not the core security service and response technologies themselves.

This technology may help Microsoft help their customers more easily integrate antivirus solutions with Exchange, but still requires the scanning engines and support infrastructure from third party antivirus and antispam vendors. This acquisition does not provide Microsoft with the security and antivirus response infrastructure necessary to support the virus protection needs of enterprise customers. Detection is only as strong as the best engine plugged into the solution.

As the threats to today's email environment continue to evolve in complexity and frequency, antivirus and antispam protection for Exchange is just one piece of an ever-expanding puzzle. Symantec will continue to provide customers with best-of-breed integrated solutions that provide broader email/messaging security and availability solutions from scanning and filtering to archiving and recovery across the heterogeneous networks in today's enterprise environments.

ENDS

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