Johannesburg, 14 May 1999
Symantec Corporation the world leader in utility software for business and personal computing, today announced the Digital Immune System, a strategy for providing corporate customers intelligent tools that keep systems running at peak performance. The Digital Immune System features a combination of Symantec`s award-winning best-of-breed applications and systems and policy management. The Digital Immune System is designed to capitalize on Symantec`s anti-virus technology, IBM`s automated virus analysis, and Intel`s management technology. The foundation for the Digital Immune System was put into place last year with the technology, marketing, and licensing agreements with IBM and Intel.
The Digital Immune System will work on its own or integrate with commonly used Enterprise Management Frameworks to give IT managers control of Symantec products in their enterprise from one console. IT professionals traditionally have had to divide their time between addressing strategic, corporate-wide issues and providing reactive, hands-on technical troubleshooting and support to associates and end users. The Digital Immune System is intended to provide these professionals a powerful set of tools that quickly identify potential desktop and server systems problems and take steps to solve these problems quickly and effectively.
"The Digital Immune System will bring Symantec`s corporate customers managed, best-of-breed solutions targeted specifically at their needs," said John Berry, Regional Director for Symantec Middle East and Africa. "By providing a corporate suite of system protection and performance enhancement tools, Symantec will continue to build on its corporate IT success and deliver on its commitment to the corporate solutions marketplace."
Symantec will release the Digital Immune System in phases during an 18-month period. The Digital Immune System will include tools and utilities for systems and policy management, virus protection, server performance, desktop configuration, diagnostics, system stability, remote system operation, management of remote users, and disaster recovery-all from a single management console. In the first phase-scheduled to be delivered in the third quarter of this year-the Digital Immune System will include a total managed anti-virus solution built on top of Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition. This will be linked to an intelligent back-end system at the Symantec AntiVirus Research Center (SARC), featuring technology conceived at IBM Research and jointly developed with the scientists at SARC.
"This is the first step toward a comprehensive system that can spread a global cure for a virus faster than the virus itself can spread," said Steve R. White, senior manager of anti-virus research at IBM`s Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. "IBM`s partnership with Symantec is yielding some incredible anti-virus technologies that will protect our customers and raise the bar for the industry as a whole."
The second phase of the Digital Immune System, scheduled to be available in the first half of 2000, will include pcANYWHERE, Norton Speed Disk, Norton Ghost, and mobile worker support. In addition, a version of the Digital Immune System will be offered in Tivoli.
Flexible, Cost-Effective Solution for Increasing User/IT Productivity IT is challenged daily with keeping desktops and servers up and running. These challenges are accompanied by the demands of an increasingly complex IT environment and limited IT resources. In addition, IT faces a series of unknowns, including threats to systems uptime, threats to IT costs, and threats to IT credibility.
Threats to systems uptime take many forms such as rolling out standard desktops or new systems, remotely, solving users` problems, dealing with highly fragmented or corrupted hard drives, and, of course, protecting your company from viruses or malicious code. Since many IT professionals are measured on fulfilling Service Level Agreements (SLAs) dealing with network availability, these threats are a significant issue for IT.
Every IT professional deals with threats to IT costs. Each time a system has problems and resources must be redirected to fix those problems, costs are incurred. Given that IT time and money are limited, and sometimes decreasing, each time an end user or a server has a problem, resources are diverted from more strategic IT issues to reactive problem solving.
Threats to credibility are perhaps the most serious for the IT organization. A high profile server goes down, perhaps one that provides e-mail or network access. A senior executive encounters a serious virus on her PC despite the anti-virus software deployed just weeks earlier. Problems like these can quickly erode the credibility of an IT organization. Decreased IT credibility can lead to diminished resource allocations. All of these diminish the ability of IT to be effective, to maintain Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and to reach strategic goals.
By optimizing desktops and servers, the Digital Immune System will increase systems uptime. Increased systems uptime, in turn, results in reduced time and resources IT spends fixing crashed systems or addressing other non-strategic issues. Reduced systems downtime increases end-user productivity while improving IT credibility and enabling IT managers to meet their SLAs.
In addition, the Digital Immune System will provide administrators easy installation and management, which helps ensure that the solution does not create additional costs or resource demands. A central console will enable simplified administration and policy management, which results in lower total cost of ownership and reduced deployment-related challenges. Administrators will have complete control over the functionality of each product in the Digital Immune System suite. In addition, whereas traditional bundles require the organization to purchase the entire package, all Digital Immune System products will be available for purchase and use individually or together, as needed.
"Intel is a leader in providing systems management building blocks that enable network administrators to implement manageability across the enterprise," said Dave R. Taylor, director of Marketing, Intel Systems Management Division. "The integration of a portion of Intel`s world-class management technologies into the Digital Immune System provides organizations a manageable and flexible solution for ensuring the high performance of desktops and servers."
A Superior Method of Updating Software
Using the Digital Immune System to update software, including virus protection, will be simple and cost-effective. For example, updating anti-virus software with in-lines can cost almost 90 times more than using an automated software update solution. Using Symantec`s SARA and Scan and Deliver for rapid delivery of Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition updates, the Digital Immune System will provide a powerful vehicle for dynamically updating desktops and servers.
Updates will be available to all Digital Immune System users; the Digital Immune System will leverage Intel management technology licensed last year to give administrators control over the level of automation, depending on the needs of the organization. Administrators can automatically distribute updates or control distribution with a simple GUI.
When Symantec solves a problem for one customer in the Digital Immune System community, all customers will benefit. For example, when one organization has a virus, the Digital Immune System will notify the Symantec AntiVirus Research Center (SARC). In turn, when a solution is generated, it will become available to all Digital Immune System users, which enables them to update their technology immediately and keep their systems running optimally. As a result, Symantec`s Digital Immune System will provide an exponential benefit-providing solutions before the problem arrives.
@EditorNote = Symantec Corporation
Symantec is the world leader in utility software for business and personal computing. Symantec products and solutions help make users productive and keep their computers safe and reliable anywhere and anytime. Symantec offers a broad range of solutions and is acclaimed as a leader in both customer satisfaction and product brand recognition. Symantec is traded on NASDAQ under the symbol SYMC. More information on the company and its products can be obtained at www.symantec.co.za This press release contains some forward-looking statements. There are certain important factors that could cause Symantec`s future development efforts to differ materially from those anticipated by some of the statements made above. Among these are the anticipation of the growth of certain market segments, the positioning of Symantec`s products in those segments, the competitive environment in the software industry, dependence on other products, changes to operating systems and product strategy by vendors of operating system, and the importance of new Symantec products. Additional information concerning those and other factors is contained in the "Risk Factors" section of the company`s annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended April 3, 1998.
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