With the daily threat of nearly 60,000 known computer viruses and the continual discovery of new, more complex viruses, McAfee.com says it wants to keep its customers in the know.
So the Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which got a proposed buy back this week from its parent company Network Associates , is asking a neighboring company for some distribution help.
McAfee said it has signed an agreement to make its Security News Network available through the Kontiki Delivery Network.
The deal allows McAfee’s more than 1.3 million customers a short, TV-quality video alerting them to new Web security threats and give them the option to simply click a link to install new trial software to protect their systems. Both the video and the software solution are delivered automatically to the customer’s computer, eliminating the need to hunt around the Web for a fix.
“McAfee.com’s Security News Network is a good example of how those subscriptions can be used to deliver critical information and offer products for trial or sale at the same time,” said Kontiki chairman and CEO Mike Homer. “Kontiki enables McAfee.com to provide a valuable customer service, to strengthen customer loyalty and to increase sales opportunities.”
Kontiki’s technology is called Bandwidth Harvesting allows content to be stored on PCs at the outer-edge of the Internet and then delivered to its customers. The platform determines which computers have requested the same rich media files, identifies the best paths across the Internet available at the time of delivery and uses the information to get the goods to the end user as soon as possible.
With 50,000 nodes in Kontiki’s network today, more than half of the bits on the network are being served from peers rather than from origin servers. In fact, for popular content, over 95 percent of the content is sent from peers.
The company also says because 50 – 75 percent of its entire delivered media are relayed from an outer edge cache instead of originating from a central server, the system can save on Internet bandwidth costs.
“As the leader in managed computer security services, it is imperative for us to provide our subscribers with timely information about late breaking security issues and to give them access to try our new software,” said McAfee.com vice president of marketing Atri Chatterjee. “The McAfee.com Security News Network is an important new service that complements our existing security information services like our e-mail alerts (McAfee.com Dispatch) and our Virus Information Library.”
Other components of McAfee.com’s Security News Network include a Product Alert subscription, notifying customers about the most recent product availability and a Free Trial product subscription offering providing potential customers with the ability to test out McAfee.com’s service at no cost.
