AVG fluffs up cloud platform

Vendor adds remote IT and email security services to CloudCare

AVG has added two more services to its CloudCare platform as it continues to move beyond its roots as an on-premise anti-virus vendor.

The new version of CloudCare, the cloud-based administration platform AVG launched last October, features the commercial edition of AVG Remote IT and AVG Email Security Services.

This builds on the anti-virus and web-filtering capabilities available from launch.

While the email service will be priced for resellers at about £1 per user per month, resellers can use the remote management function – which has been in beta testing for the past six months – for free.

AVG claims CloudCare has been adopted by 1,000 resellers, a third of which are based in the UK, and Mike Foreman, general manager for AVG SMB Group, said he expected remote management to be the most widely used service.

"It saves resellers from having to go out on the road to fix something and allows them to become more service-oriented and move away from the break-fix model," he said.

Although partners reselling AVG's on-premise anti-virus, which has been on the market for 20 years, will not be cut off, Foreman said AVG sees CloudCare – which is aimed at SMBs with up to 100 employees – as its future.

"It is where our focus is in the channel and where we are putting all our development teams and marketing efforts," he said.

Paul Fox, director of Pontefract-based VAR Pro Logic Computers, said he hoped moving to CloudCare would mean there is less danger of losing customers when their biennial subscription expires.

Fox said he had used the platform's file transfer mechanism to provide software updates and patching.

"We had a software update that was too big to email and trying to explain to the client how to use DropBox was getting us nowhere," he said. "I could have put it on a CD and posted it, or driven there, but with CloudCare we were able to get the job done that day."