![]() ![]() The day we made the acquisition announcement, my own daughter in Australia messaged me and said, “I just saw the news, but I thought that Avast was the company name, and AVG was the product.” My own daughter!įive years ago, I gave a pitch on Avast at an investment conference. It’s more sophisticated than AVG’s, and we’ll eventually migrate it into the AVG product.Īny concerns about confusing your existing users? Avast has a system of using the cloud to scan Web pages. We’ll be putting that into the Avast product. AVG has a really neat cloud-based behavioral analysis system. How many WhatsApp users know that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook?īecause we’re taking some of these technologies from both products and putting them into the other product, we’re actually going to be improving both products for users. We didn’t have a big concern about “normal” users getting upset, because they don’t really know which company owns the underlying technology. Ondrej, has been monitoring lots of “geek” forums, and he tells me that things are very positive on them. Geeks at both companies are recommenders. Geeks are our community, and we care about them. There are a few negative comments on blog posts, but most are positive, including at more geeky forums, like Wilders. ![]() Has there been any negative feedback from existing users about the deal? AVG users will get updated through their update mechanism to the new AVG, and the same for Avast users.īoth sets of product users will see some new features they did not have before, so there will be some cross-pollination. We’ll roll out the new products early in January. AVG users will continue to use an AVG-branded product, and Avast users will use an Avast-branded product. How will Avast determine who uses which product? On the consumer side, dual brands will have a different look and feel, and some different features, but they will have a common security engine. We’ve kind of fleshed out a high-level product strategy. Q: Avast and AVG offer very similar security and antivirus products. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. Confusion between them, he notes, “doesn’t matter anymore.” He also shared thoughts on threats such as Internet of Things exploits, as well as predictions for the broader security software industry. “Case by case, we tackle problems in different ways, but I think the joint solution will be better for users than a single solution,” Steckler says.ĭuring an interview with The Parallax, Steckler detailed his vision for how the two companies will combine efforts while maintaining separate products and brands. He says there’s more to the company’s vision than becoming the biggest player on the block. Up until the deal closed, AVG was a publicly traded company based in Amsterdam.Īfter three years as Symantec’s senior vice president of worldwide sales, Steckler joined Avast in 2009. Both companies were founded in what is now the Czech Republic, in the early days of the commercial Internet: Avast in Prague in 1988, AVG in Brno in 1991. In addition to the overall user base total, the company estimates 160 million users are on mobile devices, with estimated annual revenue in 2016 of more than $700 million. The newer, larger Avast will be the largest antivirus company by market share, at 22.6 percent, according to a January 2015 report by Opswat. The day we made the acquisition announcement, my own daughter in Australia messaged me and said, “I just saw the news, but I thought that Avast was the company name, and AVG was the product.” My own daughter!” - Vince Steckler, Avast CEO The vast amounts of data that the larger Avast user base will contribute is expected to help the company stay ahead of market trends. The “bring your own device” trend includes home laptops, Sanabria says, which means that traditional consumer antivirus is bearing an increasingly large load of enterprise security. While Avast and AVG are primarily known for their consumer products, the security business is finding more and more people using their personal laptops for work purposes. “That alone gives you some pretty powerful insight into the market and what’s on people’s systems.” ![]() “Free antivirus or not, 400 million is still a significant number,” Sanabria says. The deal, announced in July, comes at a time when many smaller and far younger Internet security firms find themselves up for grabs, while Avast and AVG are older than many people using the Internet.Īdrian Sanabria, a security industry analyst at 451 Research, says Avast’s newly expanded user base gives it insight at a level few consumer-based security companies achieve. That’s the hope, at least, of Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast Software, which sponsors this site. The Internet could be getting a lot safer for more than 400 million people, thanks to the close of Avast’s $1.3 billion deal on Friday to purchase its largest free antivirus competitor, AVG. ![]()
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