I went to lunch today with one of our top resellers and he asked me, "I like what you are doing in the AV space but why did you selected Sunbelt?" and I thought it would be a good idea to widely share my answer.
To start, we made our partnering decision over two years ago and we are happy with the results.
I have known the leadership at Sunbelt Software for many years and they are trustworthy and great people to work with, that was very important to me because like any relationship all parties need to work together well through thick and thin and over time. (I also know the leadership at a number of other AV related companies and they are good, trustworthy people who make great products also so this was not the only reason to work with SB, but it was a required first step).
The next step was for us to find who had a great spyware engines as many modern attacks act like spyware even though they are often considered to be viruses and Sunbelt was at the top of the list from their work with Giant which was sold to Microsoft a few years ago. My security team felt SB had great dedication to the industry and working with them was a no-brainer. Then SB added their Viper AV engine and he picture was completed. They have certifications from well known labs are more are on the way which is good, but their technology is new. But not that new, it has been around for a while now and with the new-ness comes new ways of doing things, light, fast etc. as it does not need to carry the code that solves old problems. These new ways create a great product.
The vendor we selected also needed to have a great SDK since we are doing a complete integration. So I had my engienering team visit with SB and review their engineering process along with their SDK and I got the thumbs up, so add another big green check box because of the integration fails we all fail.
We also needed to develop a business partnership in which we could add strong AV in to our existing products without a financal large impact to our end-users on pricing and SB was very creative in helping us create a win-win-win between our customers, SB and us. Great news.
I also wanted to create something new, not just a bolt on but a new way of managing computers for patch management and AV-Spyware. I wanted a new company to work with so we could work together more from the ground up which we have done, our UI and their AV and Spyware tools and data to create a new work and with 7.0 we have hit that goal as our upcoming release will show -- I hope everyone gives it a try and when your current AV subscription comes up you can just remove it from you budget as you will already have a new solution in place from us.
