OPSWAT Market Share Report - Antivirus Market Analysis: December 2012

OPSWAT Inc. has released their December 2012 market share report, “Antivirus Market Analysis: December 2012”.  The data OPSWAT used for this market share report was collected between November 16, 2011 and November 15, 2012.  It's worthwhile to check out the detailed report.  You can also learn more about OPSWAT, their reports, products and some free tools they have available.  (To be discussed on another blog).  One aspect of this market share report is that it doesn’t go into the market shares these vendors have on tablets (and smart phones).  This will become increasingly more relevant in 2013.   

A Global Analysis

Avast has to be happy.  They’re the global market share leader, though Microsoft is catching up.  They maintain nice leads over the other well-known freemium antivirus vendors, Avira and AVG Technologies.  AVG Technologies may not care as much since their    revenue stream  from Google and Yahoo will become increasingly more important (a separate discussion).  In some respects, the below isn’t great for Kaspersky since one of their corporate objectives is to surpass Trend Micro in total revenues. 

OPSWAT Market Share Report Top Five  

The Top Five in antivirus vendor market share were Avast (17.5%), Microsoft (16.8%), ESET (10.8%), Symantec (10.5%), and Avira (10.4%).     

Congratulations to the Top Five!  Largest market share loss, AVG Technologies at 1.3%.  AVG has been getting a lot of downloads of their free  (and paid) products running on Android, however.   This product came from their acquisition of DroidSecurity.  DroidSecurity (was first and the market leader)  had over 2.5 million downloads of their products prior to the 2010 acquisition. Avira, Avast, and Norton also offer free Android solutions.

http://kensek.blogspot.com/2012/12/avg-updates-its-antivirus-for-android.html

 

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In the September report, the order of the Top Five vendors:  Avast, Microsoft, Avira, and AVG Technologies.

Avast had cancelled an IPO in late July.  You have to wonder when that will take place.  http://kensek.blogspot.com/2012/07/avast-to-have-their-initial-public.html

A North America Centric View

Microsoft has a pretty incredible 32.0% share, gaining 10%.  The others in the Top Five in order, Symantec, Avast, AVG Technologies, and ESET.  Largest loss, AVG Technologies at 1.7%.  Symantec and Avast achieved small gains in share of 0.6% and 0.8%, respectively.  Microsoft has quickly become the 800-pound gorilla in Antivirus and Free Antivirus marketshare.

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But How Well Do These Products Perform in third Party Testing?

That’s always an important question.  In AV-Comparatives September Anti-Virus Comparative “File Detection Test of Malicious Software”, the top five products overall were from,  in order Avira, Trend Micro, F-Secure, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender.  ESET was 15^th, Microsoft was 17^th .Symantec hasn’t been part of 2012 testing (they wanted to pick and choose tests to participate in. )

 http://kensek.blogspot.com/2012/10/av-comparatives-file-detection-test-of.html

All of the December top five with the exception of Microsoft (didn’t participate) received October VB100 Awards.  http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archive/summary
 

What about Correlation with 3rd Party Real World Dynamic Testing?

The short answer, there’s no correlation.  From the  December AV-Comparatives “Whole Product Dynamic ‘Real World’ Protection Test",  Avira (8^th) Avast (9^th) and ESET (11^th), all received two stars, while BitDefender, G Data, Qihoo, Kaspersky and BullGuard all received three stars.

An issue for all these products is product churn.  Free competitive upgrades are often available.  With free products, switching costs to another free product is zero.  On www.download.com at CNET, Avast had 1.39 million downloads for the week  ending December 9, while AVG had 0.97 million downloads.  Annualizing these come to about 52 million downloads each. Major churn "has" to be occurring, or a product is downloaded to fix a problem an already installed product missed, and then removed.   

About OPSWAT www.opswat.com   

Founded in 2002, OPSWAT is the industry leader in software management SDKs, interoperability certification, and multiple-engine scanning solutions.

OPSWAT market share reports are available at http://www.opswat.com/media/reports   

About AV-Comparatives.org   

AV-Comparatives is an Austrian Non-Profit-Organization, which provides independent Anti-Virus software tests free to the public.  www.av-comparatives.org