10Net has appointed retail distribution partners and is also attracting partnerships with local computer vendors to bundle the product with new PCs manufactured here. It will cost under $50 for a years subscription as an introductory offer. Every licence applies to three machines.

We will work closely with PC manufacturers and large value-added resellers to ensure the broadest possible penetration into the market, says Riaan Otto, GM of 10Net ICT Solutions,

10Net brings a wealth of experience in the local security market to the table, says Ian Hale, director, global OEM partnerships at BullGuard. I have a long-standing relationship with 10Nets directors, from when I was head of Dr Solomons in SA. With 10Net on board, we expect to have our software bundled on over 200 000 machines a year in SA alone.

10Net says that it will offer second-line support to the main resellers and PC manufacturers. BullGuard will offer 24/7/365 first-line support from its live chat help desk in Romania. The 24 x 7 help desk retains 70 agents.

Bullguard has its commercial headquarters in the UK, and the product was developed in Denmark. We support our users from our support operation running from Romania, a country characterised by cost-effective, quality technical IT skills, says Hale. We also find good English language skills there, and the product supports 22 languages in total.

While South Africas 10 other official languages are not yet supported, Hale says that could change through demand by the different ethnic groups.

We will support new languages if it becomes commercially viable; it usually takes us a month to develop a new language version of the product, he says. However, due to the unique nature of African languages, we may require a slightly longer development period.

One of the features of BullGuard is its online back-up facility; we provide a gigabyte of online back-up space included in the cost of the first licence. The user has the option to purchase increased backup space through our online upgrade service (currently up to 5GB per user). In addition to the secure online backup to the Bullguard server bank in Denmark, people can use the product to backup to local drives; CD, memory stick, a removable hard drive and a DVD copy option is coming soon and will be an auto upgrade.

In this age of organised cyber-crime and PC theft, small business and power users now typically need a secure, reliable, easy to administer back-up service to protect critical files and information, we therefore recognise the need for simplicity and ease of use when activating this critical support process.

BullGuard prides itself on rapid definition updates. Our anti-virus, hostile code and spam blacklist database is maintained and updated around the clock in real-time. Our virus lab is consistently among the first on the security market to protect our users from new virus attacks and to neutralise their potential damage, says Hale. There are over 400 new attacks from around the globe registered every day; that information is fed real-time into our labs which then react by developing an immediate fix and a new definition and delivering it to all our users through the constant online updating service. It is fed seamlessly to all users as they go online and occurs in the background, so it does not interrupt their work or interfere with application performance.