My team has been diligently working over the past few months to produce what I believe is the best endpoint security solution on the market. I would like to take the opportunity to share some of the latest results of what the team has accomplished.
Maintenance Release 3 (MR3) shipped to manufacturing just a few days ago. Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) has come a long way since the initial release. In this release, we focused on improving the overall performance of both the management server and client. This week we’ll take a look at the improvements that have been made to the client and then I’ll follow this up with some of the enhancements we made on the management server.
Although considerable improvements have been made to each release, the goal for MR3 was to improve the performance to exceed that of previous versions of SEP, SAV and that of our competitors. As you can see from the charts below, MR3 has improved the boot time dramatically. A machine running SEP MR3 now starts faster than the same computer running previous versions of SAV/SCS/SEP. In addition, we have reduced the overall I/O and Paging, and we have reduced the number of threads used. Overall the client responds and performs without impacting the system. I believe that we have met the mark with performance because I am getting extremely positive feedback from customers. One of the comments I recently received from a large real estate organization stated that they didn’t even notice SEP was installed!
With this release, we also wanted to improve the time it takes to do everyday tasks. The Tolly Group recently compared Symantec Endpoint Protection against the competition and measured the overall time it took to do a task like opening Outlook and opening a Word document. As you can see below, we are doing better than our competitors and we’ll continue to improve performance in every future release. What’s even more impressive about these measurements, is that Symantec Endpoint Protection has more protection technology in the agent than these other offerings, yet still runs faster.
As part of these performance improvements, we’ve been working closely with our consumer team, the guys responsible for Norton Internet Security 2009. Check out the PC Magazine review of their latest release (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2330018,00.asp), where they won Editor’s Choice. They also spent a lot of time and effort ensuring that your security software doesn’t get in the way of getting your job done! Also, the consumer and enterprise desktop products share the same engines and components, so the detection results displayed in the article represent what you’ll see with SEP.
As you can tell, I’m very excited about SEP MR3! The response from our beta users so far has been extremely positive and I’m very confident that you’ll also enjoy the enhancements we’ve made. In a few weeks, I’ll discuss some of the enhancements we made to the management server.