Zenith Infotech Bitdefender Update

For a lot of my readers this won't mean much, but I have been getting some solid traffic from Google searches on my previous review of BitDefender, specifically people looking for more information on Zenith Infotech's rollout of BitDefender to replace AVG 7.5.

I don't think Zenith handled the initial BitDefender rollout very well, it seemed rushed and there was not a whole lot of information out there on BitDefender, either from Zenith or from third party sources. The whole point of companies partnering with Zenith is that we want them to handle a lot of this low level, not very much fun to deal with "stuff". Installing a new anti-virus solution across dozens of customer sites is not something that is all that easy to deal with, and really does cut into profit margins on a fixed cost managed services contract. When Zenith just said hey, by December 31st you better be using BitDefender and oh, here's a massive PDF of all the BitDefender documentation... I think many partners were shocked.

Thankfully, Zenith has done quite a bit to improve the situation. The best thing that has happened is that AVG will now be supporting 7.5 for a few more months, giving many partners a lot more breathing room to really start testing BitDefender in smaller clients and test networks. The other major issue I was having was trying to figure out how to roll out BitDefender to managed services clients who weren't in a domain and had no server. I talked with Zenith BitDefender support about this and was just told that there was no stand alone client, they did not give me a solution at all. Well, Zenith has finally released a guide on how to setup BitDefender in a stand alone mode. It isn't perfect, you will need a server with a public IP and depending on how many clients you will have in stand alone mode a lot of bandwidth. BUT, it is better than nothing.

They have also improved the situation in my eyes just by letting us know the reasons behind why they switched. I joined the Zenith Advisory Board (really not a big deal, if you are a Zenith partner feel free to join yourself!) on LinkedIn and have been able to hear from a lot of other partners about the issues they have been having with BitDefender, and other issues with Zenith. It has been great, because Akash Saraf, the CEO of Zenith Infotech, has been responding to us on a regular basis. To close, I'll let Mr. Saraf do the talking:

First and foremost, I would like to apologize to everyone on how quickly we are pushing this change. The upgrade for AVG 7.5 to AVG 8.0 is a full uninstallation of AVG 7.5 and a reinstall of AVG 8.0 - like moving from AVG 7.5 to any other antivirus. Given the number of agents we had we had internal discussions with Grisoft to give us an upgrade mechanism - which was committed to us and lately they got back stating that the upgrade mechanism could not be created. It was our mistake in trusting Grisoft to provide an upgrade mechanism on and hence the rushed upgrade process as from January 1st, 2009 there will be no further updates on AVG 7.5. 

With respect to moving away from AVG, this was done because we've seen their quality of product degrade quite a bit in terms of virus detection capability as well as a lot of updates that have caused problems with installed software. We've been looking at alternatives for the past 6 months and we did a test of a number of different antivirus products and found BitDefender very good in their speed of updates as well as their detection rates.

Another area of complaints we've received is Zenith no more rolling out the antivirus for partners. We did try to put a stop to this service earlier also (in December 2007), but decided to give it one more try. We've had a lot of trouble delivering this service and despite a lot of changes and trying on our end we've not been able to get rollouts to work correctly. Hence the decision to reduce our prices (from $4.25 per workstation per month to $3.00 per workstation per month) to compensate for the loss of the service where Zenith rolls out the antivirus.