Sunbelt Software is looking to make a serious stir in the saturated anti-virus industry and is promising resellers guaranteed margins of 20-30 per cent.

The anti-virus vendor claims it has drummed up 32 end-user projects of more than 500 seats since it touched down in the UK in January. It is now looking to allocate these to its reseller base, which already includes Security Partnerships, Willow Starcom and Servio.

David Parkin, EMEA sales director at Sunbelt, revealed that the US-based firm had pumped more than £100,000 into its UK operation in the first quarter alone.

Parkin said Sunbelt’s Vipre technology is “next generation” and capable of shaking up the status quo.

“We are approaching a saturated market with the message that anti-virus does not have to slow systems down, which many of the current solutions do,” he said.

“We would like to be the next McAfee in Europe. We have the technology to do that, but we need to encompass the channel and find end-user projects for them.”

Mike Trup, managing director of Interactive Ideas ­ which was appointed sole distributor of Sunbelt in January ­ said Sunbelt had two advantages over its competitors.

“Sunbelt’s footprint on PCs is much lower, so you can run applications in the background,” he said. “The cost is also much lower.”