Symantec's Norton 360 revs up for version 4.0 release

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 04 February 2010 21:00

Business IT - Security

Using the same internal engine as Norton Internet Security 2010, including the new 'reputation security model', while adding a series of additional consumer-friendly features, including better backup, Symantec's speedy security suite is soon set to launch!

Symantec today invited a series of journalists to visit the headquarters of the Australian 'Triple Eight Race Engineering' team, home to V8 Supercars champions Craig Lowndes and Jamie Whincup, to see some of the final preparations before the race season starts later this month in Abu Dhabi and then Bahrain, before returning to Australia.

Symantec is one of the Triple Eight's sponsors, along with Vodafone, Nokia, Toshiba and others, with the tie-in between the superfast racing speeds of the V8 Supercars and the massively improved performance of Symantec's Norton security products over the last couple of years the obvious connection.

Tech journalists were able to take a guided tour and see the amazing $10m-per-year setup, which included car and engine designers able to send motor and many other car parts for rapid manufacture in special machines worth more than $1m just downstairs from the designers, leading to 93% of the car being manufactured around a the latest GM Holden chassis on site, with every ounce of technical capability and racing nous in use to design the fastest V8 Supercars possible.

After the extensive tour, (some photos are on pages 4 and 5), the presentation naturally segued into a brief presentation on the upcoming Norton 360 Version 4.0 release for this year (2010), which is now in the very final stages of testing before the code goes gold in the very near future, likely well before the end of the month.

The existing Norton 360 v3 is, according to market stats company GfK, the No.1 security software suite in Australia (as it is in other parts of the world), and naturally you'd expect Symantec to want to ensure its market leadership long continues.

While tests of the final Norton 360 v4 code will determine just how much better its performance is over the previous version, Symantec emphasised that 'protection, performance and usability' were as key to its designers as building the fastest V8 racing cars were to the Triple Eight designers, mechanics and engineers - as you'd expect Symantec would say.

Symantec's David Hall, the Asia Pacific regional product manager of the Norton product suites, showed us the new user interface (UI), which had a nice graphical facelift while staying true to the tried and trusted existing design, and explain that the software and UI had been optimized based on customer feedback and usability testing, with other 'under the hood' engineering changes.

We also saw an internal 'dashboard' of various metrics from installation time, installation size, memory usage and more which was updated on a build-by-build basis as the Norton team drew ever closer towards the final version.

Here we could see a series of readouts looking similar to a speedometer, with green, yellow and red sections showing different levels of performance, with the aim of getting all the indicators firmly in the green.

So what did we see on the dashboard, and what of Symantec's testing procedures? Photos of the Triple Eight Race Engineering V8 Supercar tour on pages 4 and 5. 

Continued on page 2, please read on!