Symantec scraps Sygate consumer firewall
Sygate Personal Firewall products get the ax due to overlap with Norton one month after Symantec's takeover of Sygate.
The Sygate Personal Firewall and Sygate Personal Firewall Pro products will no longer be available effective Nov. 30, Symantec spokesman Phil Weiler said Monday. Consumers will receive special upgrade pricing when they buy a replacement product from Symantec?s Norton family of Internet security products, he said.
By pulling the Sygate Personal Firewall, Symantec is further reducing the options for people looking for a free firewall for their computer. Sygate offered the Sygate Personal Firewall at no cost and sold Sygate Personal Firewall Pro. Kerio Technologies has previously said it will discontinue its desktop firewall at the end of this year.
"While the Sygate products complement our enterprise offerings, there was an overlap on the consumer side of the business. After looking at the Sygate Personal Firewall technology we decided to discontinue the products and continue selling Norton Personal Firewall," Weiler said.
The Sygate Personal Firewall was downloaded more than 3.6 million times from CNET Download.com, a division of CNET Networks, the publisher of News.com.
Consumers looking for a free firewall still have options. These include Zone Labs' Zone Alarm, Microsoft's Windows Firewall and Jetico.
Symantec will continue to support and develop the Sygate enterprise product portfolio, including Symantec Sygate Enterprise Protection, Symantec Sygate On-Demand, Symantec Sygate Embedded and Symantec Sygate Network Access Control, Weiler said.
Symantec announced the takeover of Fremont, Calif.-based Sygate in August. The deal was closed in October.