Symantec looking for greater presence in Asia

With the online business booming and broadband connectivity increasing rapidly in India, Symantec?s consumer product division is coming up with software packages under the 'Norton' brand.

This will provide safe transactions online between various websites. With e-commerce retail sales gradually picking up, computer security has become a concern for users.

Symantec's focus for 2005-06 is to simplify its products and make them more relevant to consumers. For this it has integrated a feature known as Norton solution Centre in the new range of products.

"It is like a dashboard of a car and will show which areas of a system are unsecured and need to be protected on a continuous basis," said Jocelyn Chug, senior product manager, consumer and small business group, Symantec Corporation.

It is also bringing in Norton Security Inspector (NIS) into the internet security product line. "The greatest risk is when we download a programme but not always change the level of their security settings,"adds Chug. The NIS will constantly monitor the security settings thereby stopping the corrupt contents from flowing in along with the programmes.

Symantec after its merger with storage software vendor Veritas has 25 per cent of its global revenues coming from its consumer product division. Out of this, 12-18 per cent is being contributed by the Asia Pacific region, wherein Japan is the largest market contributing 70 per cent of the revenues for the region.

Only 3 per cent of the total consumer product revenues come from Asia.

Symantec sees a larger role for itself in India and China but finds India easy to handle because of the language advantage. With this new product there is a larger scope for Symantec to tie up with financial institutions and companies that offer e-commerce by deploying its security products on their backend system.