AVID, which stands for Anti-Virus Is Dying, is a semi-regular item in this Blog. AVID is my quixotic campaign to dismantle the $3.7 billion AV industry. The AV industry doesn’t deserve to disappear because its signature-based AV products offer inadequate protection to their users—if there were no alternatives to such technology, it might be excusable, but as it happens software products from at least 3 vendors; AppSense, Bit9 and Securewave (and possibly others) can and do make computers 100 percent virus-proof—and in the right way. Let’s stop the madness.

My last AVID posting published a League of Shame, exposing the amount of time that the AV vendors leave their customers vulnerable when a new virus appears. Was it a surprise to you that the two biggest AV vendors, Symantec (27 hours 10 minutes) and Network Associates, which markets the McAfee AV product, (26 hours 11 minutes) were among the three worst responders in this particular survey? It didn’t surprise me. “Par for the course” was my thought.

An AVID reader pinged me, saying she thought that maybe I should also publish the names of the companies that were at the bottom of that League of Shame. Should I or shouldn’t I?

I think I should, because it gives an indication of how long it takes to get an AV fix out, even if you do the job as quickly as it can be done. In the survey the fastest responses came from Kaspersky (6 hours 51 minutes) and Bitdefender (8 hours 21 minutes).

My correspondent also mentioned that her company was now looking for alternatives to AV, but wouldn’t be doing anything until their current license expired. Is this a straw in the wind? Well it might be, but it isn’t a whole haystack. One swallow doesn’t make a decent meal—as friend of mine from Liverpool used to say.

Nevertheless time is on my side. You will understand why I believe that, as the AVID blog postings roll out.

Will anything upset the dominance of Apple in the music market? In the short term, probably not. The iPod isn’t a product, it’s an industry and music consumers have become used to the excellent combination of device, software and channel that Apple has provided. In the long run though, Apple will not be able to maintain its dominance. Here’s why:

1. Apple is not going to dominate DRM. Microsoft probably is. I feel uneasy about being too positive about Microsoft technology, but there is no denying that Microsoft did a really excellent peice of technical work on DRM. And it has the advantage that it owns the OS that most video will play on. If Sony puts a root-kit on your PC then we all cry foul, but Microsoft can put anything it wants on your PC. This gives it a huge advantage over other DRM providers except for Apple. But the television and movie industry is not going to wait for Apple to become dominant in the PC market. Microsoft will have its piece of the action and this will put Apple in a far more competitive position than it currently is. It will not dominate video like it dominates music. It will be a shared market.
2. Apple’s dominance of music is under threat anyway. The point is simply this. The mobile phone carriers and manufacturers of this world are not going to donate their industry to Apple. All that is required to upset the Apple cart is software that can out-iPod the iPod on a mobile phone.

It exists and it’s British. Are you serious Bloor?

Well yes, actually. Long time associates of mine and software industry heavyweights of long standing Rob Lewis, Phil Sant and Mark Knight have been nurturing a start-up called Omnifone. Now it has product and, technically, it’s very impressive. Put simply, it’s software that plays music on a mobile phone. I know these guys. This is not a dim-simple MP3 player. Sticklers for technical elegance, they’ve gone and designed it as self-configuring so that it optimizes its foot print and runs on anything. It has a pretty interface. It has parallel downloading. DRM is built in. Am I boring you yet?

It is British, so it must be great technology that goes nowhere? Well perhaps, but as things stand, operators that collectively have more than 50 percent of the world mobile market have signed up with Ominfone as development partners.

And what does this mean for Apple? It means that Apple is going to run very fast to maintain its share of the music market. It means that Apple’s real iPod phone needs to be very compelling. It probably will be, but Apple’s share of the music market is set to decline anyway.

As you may have know if you read this blog regularly, AVID (Anti Virus Is Doomed) is a semi-regular section where, when the mood takes me, I expose the fact that signature-based AV technology is utterly inadequate—because it fails to protect its users from a new virus for many hours after it first appears. The whole point of AVID is that there is excellent technology from three companies, Bit9, Securewave and AppSense that really does stop all viruses and by “all” I mean 100 percent, as opposed to AV technology which doesn’t. Companies that deploy these products don’t need AV technology and hence can save real dollars, pounds or euros by not paying for protection that doesn’t work.

How big is the shameful AV scam? According to Frost & Sullivan, the AV market had revenues of $3.27 billion in 2005 and it is likely to grow to $7.49 billion in 2012—unless I manage to stop it.

To that end, this week I’ve decided to publish The League Of Shame and name the ten AV companies that were found to be the worst at protecting you from viruses in a recent test of AV response. The figures I give below come from AV-Test.org (located in Germany at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg). They were arrived at by monitoring the responses of AV companies to new viruses over a 3 day period. The time period given below is the period of time before the named vendor was able to post an AV signature following the appearance of a new virus or virus variant.

The League of Shame

1. InoculateIT-VET 29:45
2. Symantec 27:10
3. McAfee 26:11
4. A2 24:12
5. Esafe 17:16
6. Panda 14:04
7. Command 13:59
8. Norton 13:10
9. Trend Micro 13:06
10. Dr Web 12:31

Symantec, shame on you. McAfee, shame on you too. We’re done here.

I spent part of last week at Marne La Vallée Chessy with CA. Marne La Vallée is conveniently located near to Charles De Gaule airport and it is within driving distance of Chantilly, Chartres, Versaille and that great European capital, Paris. I was surprised to discover that it is also the location of an historical but little known commercial disaster. Apparently many years before the Dot Com era, when backing absurd ideas was une peste effrayante, mais rare, investors watched their money se donner la flamme in the attempt to establish an American parc de loisirs en le coeur de French France. It’s astonishing that anyone believed such une idée aberrante had a chance of success but they surely did. They even completed it and opened it before commercial reality dawned.

Nowadays it is merely a collection of faded and bizarre hotels that are stumbled on by adventurous tourists who stray from the beaten track. But because there is such a preponderance of hotels it is also used by companies to hold conferences. So on the edge of the archaeological ruins of le parc de loisirs, (I can’t remember what’s its called, e-something I think) a healthy trade is carried out by the usual hotel chains. On the day I arrived a Lenovo event of some kind was in full swing and the CA event was in preparation.

I could write quite a lot about the time I spent with CA but I’ll confine myself to two points.

Point one is that CA is assembling a healthy storage software portfolio. It is healthy in the sense that it is relevant, well integrated and, apparently, selling well. It is also set to expand in the coming year. Data storage counts as CEO John Swainson’s first change of direction. When he took the helm he sidelined the storage business, determined to focus on System Management and Security. Following discovery (of commercial facts) and debate, he changed his mind and included storage among the primary focus areas. This has happily coincided with a time when EMC has yet to get its storage software act together and Symantec is suffering a bit of VERITAS indigestion (indigestium veritatum).

Point two is that CA Labs are, I believe, going to become a significant factor in CA’s future evolution. I enjoyed a very long and wide ranging conversation with Peter Matthews of CA Labs which told me, if nothing else, that CA is well aware of most of the critical problems that exist in the management space and how they will need to be solved.

Roughly stated, the general problem is this: If you want to be able to manage a whole resource space such as a network of thousands of servers, you need something that equates to an operating system for the whole space.

This Uber-OS has to have 100% availability and will need to be able to deal with multiple streams of information coming to it from every node. It will have to resolve such information feeds, not just in real-time, but predictively and resolve them with reference to a complex rules-base of SLAs. In other words this is not your father’s OS, but something else. I could say a good deal more but it gets very complex—especially if the whole domain is also changing in real-time, which it will be. If you bump into Peter Matthews, ask him about it.

I left the parc de loisirs knowing more than when I had arrived. (That’s what it was called! E-Urodisney).