Network Associates, offering what some customers say is the best management tool on the market, has racked up its share of touchdowns against antivirus archrival Symantec.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools has installed McAfee antivirus software on 50,000 of its 80,000 computers since August 2003. It chose Network Associates in part because its pricing was more attractive than Symantec’s, says Debbie Karcher, executive officer of information-technology services. But Karcher’s team encountered a small problem with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO): The management utility at first did not allow all of the school district’s 450 site administrators to access the system.
“We’re so large that we ran into things that I’m sure they had not run into before,” she says, adding that Network Associates’ technical support was “excellent” in resolving the issue.
That snafu may be an exception. In 2001, when Ticketmaster Corp. merged technology operations with Citysearch—both are now units of InterActiveCorp—the companies standardized their software. Citysearch had adopted Symantec for antivirus protection, while Ticketmaster was starting to roll out McAfee. The balance tipped in Network Associates’ favor because “ePO, as an umbrella management product, was far superior to anything else,” says Christian Horner, head of information systems at Ticketmaster. Symantec’s System Center, by contrast, is unable to manage third-party antivirus clients: “They don’t play nice with McAfee,” Horner says.
But Network Associates has also tripped out of bounds at times. Other customers have found that its desktop software requires more maintenance than that of other vendors (see Voice of Experience, p. 71). And some say the application drags down PC performance. “It’s minimal, but we do see a performance hit after we install the McAfee antivirus software,” says Michael Stern, vice president of information technology at Handex Group, an environmental-consulting firm.
Network Associates defends its antivirus software as quick, reliable and easy to manage. “Our agent is extremely fast, and in terms of size we’re probably one of the smallest in the industry,” says John Bedrick, the company’s group product marketing manager for systems security.
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