ESET Distribution Middle East, the regional business development center of ESET NOD32 Antivirus, have appointed Hussein Mohammed Hussein Zedan & Partners Limited (Zedan), as its distributor for Saudi Arabia. NOD32 was recently presented with the Best Antivirus Product of 2006 award by the independent consumer organization, AV-Comparatives.
“When you combine the speed, accuracy and advanced heuristics capabilities of ESET’s solution, it is clearly the best performing AV product on the market today,” said Andreas Clemeti of AV-Comparatives.
In tests by Virus Bulletin magazine, of the five top brand names only NOD32 has never missed a single virus. NOD32 has been presented the Virus Bulletin 100 percent detection award 41 times; a unique distinction. ESET has also found NOD32 to be the fastest in comparative testing of 15 antivirus products running on Microsoft Windows Vista Business Edition (32-bit).
“We have sold many different antivirus products over the years, but NOD32 is something else entirely. When we tested it and saw its performances in industry tests, we knew we had to have this product,” said Brian Hawley, GM, Zedan. “The name is relatively new to the Middle East, but NOD32 is so clearly superior to other brands in performance and price that we expect it to storm the market.”
Hawley explained that for the last year, Zedan had been actively looking for an antivirus product that performed better than ones which had been widely promoted in the Kingdom.
“The ‘big name’ antivirus products have often been the worst,” he commented. “Huge and clunky, these products use vast amounts of system resources and slow PCs down horribly. Additionally, there was no local support for these products, supply chains were dysfunctional, prices high, and they didn’t always catch all the viruses!”
So Hawley started researching other AV products and came up with a few he liked. Unfortunately, the ones that were good technically often had other drawbacks in areas such as support, marketing and commitment to the region — or they did not cover the entire range adequately, e.g. poor Linux support. Also, many only covered viruses and needed add-ons for malware, phishing and adware.
“When we tried NOD32 we were astounded at the performance,” remarked Hawley. “It’s written in Assembly Language and is blindingly fast. It’s easy to install and support. The updates are tiny and fast. NOD32 even has fully-supported versions for DOS, Linux and all the popular mail servers.
They are geared up to ISP filtration set-ups (http://www.eset.com/solutions/isp.php) and have a remote administration tool that makes sure all PCs on a network are protected — it even detects unknown unauthorized PCs plugged into the network! Looking at the technical and performance reviews, nobody had a bad word to say about NOD32. They consistently out-performed all the brand leaders by a wide margin. We had never seen anything like it. It was a breath of fresh air.”
He continued, “Here is a little test we did to confirm the advantages of NOD32. Plug a USB drive with a virus on it into a protected PC. NOD32 is about the only product that will nail it in seconds.
Most other AV products don’t even notice it’s there unless you try to open the file or specifically scan the drive. But the feature that impressed us most was how little effect it had on the speed of the PC. The lean assembler code uses hardly any resources.”
Zedan (www.zedan.com.sa) will offer NOD32 through several channels in Saudi Arabia including sales through existing Zedan resellers, direct sales by Zedan itself and via retail outlets with NOD32’s retail packs.
Zedan will also provide the first level of support with the second level of support done by ESET through phone or e-mail. Consumers can find NOD32 Antivirus at Jarir Bookstores, PC-Net, Extra and CompuMe.
Businesses should contact Zedan for a list of channel partners and solution providers.
