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Technology Stocks : Symantec (SYMC) - What does it look like? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: byhiselo who wrote (1651)	9/8/1999 4:36:00 PM
From: Elmer Flugum	Respond to of 2069

Symantec May Have A Way To 'Save Time' Software aims to block all those sports, adult and gaming Web sites gobbling up employees' workdays investors.com "There are lots of ways to waste time on the Web. And security software maker Symantec Corp. wants to help employers block out most of them. Controlling access to Web sites is not a new idea. Companies lose millions of dollars in productivity as employees surf sports, entertainment, gambling, pornography and even day trading Web sites. Internet users spend nearly 20 million hours per month on porn sites, which is about the same amount of time spent on news sites, says PC Data Inc. Another 31 million hours are spent accessing online gaming sites. And in just one month, access to the Penthouse Web site by employees of three Fortune 100 companies cost the employers over $350,000 in lost revenue and productivity, says Nielsen Media Research. 'Unless measures and policies are put in place, the reality is that companies' productivity levels are impacted, leading to lost revenue and reduced competitiveness,' said Gary Warren, Symantec vice president. Symantec has a patent for a technology that can filter Web sites with a fine-toothed comb. Most products that filter through Web sites rely on a database of predetermined words and phrases to block access to particular sites. But that process often blocks out many 'good' sites. Blocking out all sites with the word 'sex' could prevent a human resources employee from accessing important data on sexual harassment laws, Warren says. Symantec's new technology, however, works on the fly to analyze words and pictures on Web sites - and to put them in context. 'It can tell the difference between a chicken breast and a porn site by looking at the accompanying text and pictures,' Warren said. Acquired through Symantec's purchase of URLabs in July, the filtering technology was first developed by NASA. It also can be used to scan the content of e-mails and filter out junk mail, says Enrique Salem, vice president of Symantec's security and assistance division. In addition, companies will be able to fine-tune Symantec's filtering products to block out only certain kinds of sites and to set up different access rights for different levels of employees. In line with its new focus on Internet security, Symantec will start adding the technology into its software by year-end, Salem says. Products also will be available for consumers. Parents can use the technology to set up access controls for their children, he says. For companies, one of the newest problem areas is the amount of time employees spend day trading, says Warren. Symantec's technology can filter out trading sites by searching for fractions and key words such as 'stock' or 'trade' and then analyzing their context. Harder to track are hate sites that don't always have easily recognizable key words. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, for example, monitors links to hate-group sites. The center has found 2,000 sites that it identifies as 'problematic.' The number of such sites rose 60% in the last year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Without having to rely on a preset database of taboo words and phrases, Symantec's technology can keep up with the explosion of such sites on the Web, Warren says. 'The drawbacks with the database approach are that the database will always be out of date, and something will slip through,' he said. Sales of Internet access control products such as Symantec's are expected to rise 53% a year, or from $31 million in 1998 to almost $260 million in 2003, says International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. So far, school districts are the biggest customers, Warren says. 'A lot of people don't understand the size of this market,' he said. 'But a school district with a half million students is a huge network.' The next emerging market, says Warren, is Internet service providers, which can offer filtering to both businesses and consumers. Symantec also hopes to sell its technology to search-engine companies and even firms that do voice-recognition analysis and need to understand the context of words. 'We expect (the new content security products) to account for 40%-plus of our revenue in the years ahead,' Salem said.