The top seven antivirus vendors all produce solid virus detection engines and rapidly updated virus signatures to address the latest threats.  They also frequently collaborate and communicate jointly on issues addressing the industry as a whole.  They have been frequent critics of design elements of operating system and application vendors in the past for not making the execution of rogue code more difficult. 

While we are not an antivirus vendor, we do have a deep understanding of Microsoft database technologies, so when the first viruses started appearing in database products, we were contacted, first by McAfee/Network Associates, and later by the other primary vendors about developing and licensing code to specifically work with database-borne threats.  Our ability to provide a code base that did not require Microsoft’s database products be installed, or even for the operating system to be a variant of Microsoft Windows, made us the perfect choice for these vendors.  We have since licensed our antivirus code to all the major vendors with the exception of IBM and Symantec.