Lautin, who has been in the IT security business since the 1980s, says that he joined Panda Security last year from a rival major IT security software vendor that offered a variety of pay-for security applications, as well as a free offering.
So why do vendors give away their software for free, we asked him – surely this doesn't make commercial sense?
It's all about sales and positioning strategy, he says, adding that some East European vendors have been very successful with raising their profile with free software. And, he told Infosecurity, the issue is of major concern to all the established IT security players.
Surprisingly, he said, there is little 'cannibalisation' between the free and pay-for industry, with only small numbers of the latter category of users going down the free software route.
Free software users, he explained, are a totally different category of user from the pay-for customers.
But, he says, the market is changing, as a growing number of IT security software vendors are moving away from a memory-hogging application – whether free or not – that sits on the users' PC, in favour of a cloud-based service with a client application with a very small footprint that sits in the users' computer memory.
"99% of users don't know the difference between a cloud-based security application and a conventional one. And they don't need to know. They just want something that works," he said.
And because of this, Lautin predicts that the industry will migrate to cloud-based IT security systems in the next few years, as this allows the vendor access to a far greater data pool of security threats – known in the business as a `collective intelligence.'
By offering users a free cloud security service, he says, vendors can significantly increase the size of their collective intelligence data pool, and so offer enhanced services for their pay-for users.