Collective Intelligence

 

 

In the last couple of days I have been asked a few times about the sudden death of the antivirus. Brian Dye, still “Senior Vice President, Information Security” at Symantec, has said that the antivirus is dead in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

I can understand the uncomfortable feeling of those millions of users and companies protected by Norton antivirus, they will ask themselves if they can trust a company whose Senior Vice President for Information Security says “We don’t think of antivirus as a moneymaker in any way.” Will that company invest what it should to improve a product they consider already dead?

I have been working for this antivirus company, Panda Security (yes, that one with the cute panda bear logo), for more than 15 years, and I have been asked the very same question just a couple billion times. And here we are, protecting millions of users all around the world that put their trust (and their money!) in us.

To all of you who feel you’ve been left orphaned, consider Panda Security as a serious alternative. We’ll keep innovating and investing in the antivirus field as we have always done. I remember when I joined Panda that we were already offering daily updates through the Internet. Not a big deal, you can think. Well, at the very same time some of our major competitors were still sending signature updates once per month in diskettes (yes, I am not kidding). In fact we were the first antivirus company in the world to do that. In 2006, when everyone thought that clouds were just the ones you can see in the sky, we were already working in our Collective Intelligence. In 2009 we released Panda Cloud Antivirus, the first cloud antivirus in the market.

These are just a few examples, there are many more and what is better, there will be even more. Sometimes people get surprised when they find out how many years I have been working for Panda, my enthusiasm let them think I have just joined the company. There is not a simple recipe to achieve this, but at the end there are some secret ingredients.

Antivirus has to evolve. It has been evolving and it will be evolving forever. To evolve you need to invest in it, and no company invests in something they consider dead. To be involved in the creation and development of new technologies and revolutionary approaches to combat malware and fighting cybercriminals is one of those secret ingredients.

This revolution never ends. In a few weeks we will be presenting the next revolution. Stay tuned.