Karel Obluk, CTO of the Brno, Czech Republic-based ISV, said Grisoft has been expanding its offering beyond pure AV, having adding a software firewall option in mid-2005, and the Ewido acquisition will continue that process. While it will continue to support and develop the Ewido scanner as a standalone product, with the launch of a beta of version 4.0 due on April 24, 2006, the rationale behind the purchase is to grow the flagship product.
Grisoft was founded in 1991. It has some three million paying subscribers for AVG around the world, and its primary markets are the US, UK, Italy, and Australia. The number of users increases to 30 million when the freely downloadable home edition of the package is included, and the business model is to offer upgrades to paying licensees, with the additional features of firewall and anti-spyware as reasons to go for the upgrade.
Obluk said Grisoft targets primarily the consumer, SoHo, and SMB space. It started out looking for an anti-spyware company to acquire with both technology and the all-important database to underscore the offering. However, when it came across Erlangen, Germany-based Ewido, it decided the technology was good enough that it would buy even without a database, and will soon announce a license agreement with one of the major spyware vendors for its database. As for product roadmap, he said: We’ll be launching some new tools as a result of the acquisition within the next couple of months, then work for full integration, with the fourth quarter as the most optimistic timeframe for completion of that process.
He said that while the immediate benefit from the acquisition will be Ewido’s anti-spyware offering, they have a very advanced emulator within their product which could help us improve our engine to offer proactive protection that doesn’t rely on signatures. He said this could help to unpack and inspect code that’s been created to bypass scanners.
Both Grisoft and Ewido are privately held companies, so no financial details of the transaction were disclosed.
