Written By : Ulukai
August 2004

The people at Norman were kind enough to provide us with some answers for our questions.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Norman, they basically provide the means to secure and protect your computer and network.

They have won several prestigious awards for both their anti-virus software and their firewall solution (http://www.norman.com/News/Awards/en) and they are a certified partner of Microsoft.( http://www.norman.com/News/Press_releases/15568/en)

On a personal note, I have been using Norman Virus Control for almost 5 years now and I am very pleased with it. Norman Virus Control even lets me run Doom 3 without having to turn it off, which is not the case for some other anti-virus products I know.

Here's the interview.

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General questions:

1. It's my understanding that you started out as Shark with Thunderbyte anti-virus. Then you merged with Norman. Can you tell us a little bit more about this??

Norman: Yes indeed, we started about 12 years ago as SHARK with ThunderBYTE Antivirus Utilities, TBAV. TBAV was developed by a Dutch company called ESaSS, located in Wijchen. SHARK became the biggest TBAV distributor, and was responsible for the Benelux, and in a later stage also for EMEA. 7 years ago ESaSS entered into cooperation with the Norwegian antivirus company Norman. Norman had developed antivirus software for NetWare, which ESaSS started to resell as a TBAV product. The relationship with Norman and ESaSS was very close, and it was decided to merge both companies. Norman was looking for a sales office in the Benelux, and logically SHARK was approached to fulfil this task. Since then, Norman owns a major part in SHARK which is responsible for all Norman products in the Benelux region.

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2. Norman offers several products ranging from firewalls to anti-virus to anti-spam. Can you elaborate a little about this?

Norman: Besides Virus Control for several platforms Windows, Linux, Netware) we offer other products like:
Norman Personal Firewall
Norman Privacy (encryption)
SpamWeed (anti-spam)
Anti Spyware/ Adware
Spam Control for servers
Mailscanners for Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, Linux, SMTP-gateway
Download Control (for the ISA server)
Data Recovery (recover data from damaged media)
Data Erasure (safely remove data from systems)

On our website you may find a lot of information about this arranged in 'Products & services' or on the Dutch section 'Producten en Diensten'.

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3. The press centre mentions the cooperation of Norman and Lavasoft: is this going to lead to a new product? Are there any more new products on the horizon?

Norman: Not really a new product. We are going to sell the well known application 'Ad-aware'. Nowadays there is a growing need for protection against Spyware and Adware. Now we can offer our customers a complete protection against Spam, Adware, Spyware and Malware.