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1 edit | reply to freidrich Re: AV Programs - most users?!
"Most users" is likely unquantified. Most sales revenues are to corporations, not households. The number of seats actually used is therefore unknown. You also have to consider that hardware based devices have grown rapidly in use, serving at the edge of the entire network for antivirus protection as well as traditional firwall and intrusion detection. The number of seats protected in this manner is also unknown.
So the best you can do is to use revenue as the basis, I would think. Sometimes you will find admissions as to the number of machine hitting the update servers. This too is not reliable, as in managed settings the notion of each machine hitting an update server for new definition files is unthinkable. Revenue figures are tough as the top antivirus companies are likely privately held, and often in countries without the security law provisions for disclosure that would govern a US corporation, for example. Antivirus software manufacturers are interesting for how geographically diverse they are; you have Symantec (US), Panda (Spain), ESET (Croatia), Kaspersky (Russia), Trend Micro (Japan), for example. Finally, the market shares are often of strong regional bias. The top sellers in the US are likely not identical to even Western Europe, and surely have no relationship to sales in China or the Pacific Rim generally.
So in the end you will likely only find guesstimates by leading research companies; none of whom publish their complete reports for free access.
Good luck. You may consider building (in a reasonably narrow range of focus) your own guesses as to seats and market share by revenue. -- ============ MS-MVP 2004 - -2008, ASAP Member Users Helping Users
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