Software and Security: ESET

Brief History

ESET is a security company, located at Bratislava, Slovakia. In 1992 Anton Zajac, a theoretical physicist with programming as his primary research tool, founded ESET with his colleagues Maros Grund, Rudolf Hruby, Richard Marko, Peter Pasko and Miroslav Trnka.

ESET has several branches and partners all over the world[1]. The company employs roughly about 200 people.

Products

Anton Zajac started the company at the times that worms and viruses were invented and deployed. It was the Michelangelo worm that started him thinking about antivirus software. Therefore, the first project that the team created was NOD, antivirus software that ran on MS-DOS. After a few years, they changed the name to NOD32. For legal reasons, they then changed the name to NOD32 Antivirus.

During the years, they decided to create and deploy a second product. It was – and still is – a combination of NOD32 Antivirus with antispam and firewall functions. They named it “ESET Smart Security”.

Market Share

We’re not going to lie. When talking about Antivirus Software, there are a lot of competing companies. In Germany, Panda is used the most, in Eastern and Central Europe it’s Kaspersky. Although, with roughly 150 000 users in 160 countries, ESET has a market share of 9%.

ESET has had a nice growth over the years. It has had tremendous gains. In 2006, their revenue was about $33,6 million. In 2009 they had a revenue of $111.4 million, which is a growth of roughly 228 percent. At the end of this year, ESET is estimating a growth of more than 50% and a market share of about 10%.

Organizational Chart

To understand just how big ESET really is, an organizational chart helps a lot. ESET has one Chief Executive Officer, Anton Zajac, one of the founders of ESET. The company is divided in two parts, a headquarter in Eastern Europe, and one in America. There are quite some people who have an executing function. You can all see them on the organizational chart. What will probably strike you, is that almost all of the founders are still occupied in the company.