AVG Releases Free Recovery Toolkit as a Standalone Product

AVG Technologies released a new recovery and administrative toolkit this week that could help its channel partners generate business and add value to their security customers.

The company made the new AVG Rescue CD available to all customers, including those taking advantage of the free version of AVG antivirus. Downloadable onto a CD or USB stick, the toolkit is designed to offer plug-and-play recovery that can help technicians fix endpoints damaged by pervasive virus and spyware attacks.

The recovery software automatically mounts all hard drives on the computer and scans for viruses and malware, then provides the ability to restore a safe network connection to the computer. It also offers administrators advanced options including a Windows registry editor, a TestDisk utility to recover deleted files and lost partitions, a file browser and a Ping tool for network diagnostics.

Prior to this release, AVG Rescue CD was offered only embedded within AVG’s SMB product line.

"By making the Rescue CD freely available as a standalone product, AVG provides channel partners with a great new opportunity to generate new business and offer an additional service free of charge to their existing customers," says Robert Gorby, global head of small business propositions for AVG. "New business can be generated off the back of them cleaning an infected computer, by cross-selling other products or services to that customer."

Gorby believes that the free offering could also become a powerful sales tool to convince customers to make a switch from a competing antivirus company over to AVG.

"It could also be used as a tool by channel partners to switch a customer to AVG if their computer has become infected whilst using a competitor product," he says. "At the very least, it will be a positive message from the partner and AVG to the customer–which will benefit come renewal. At best it will enable the channel partner to switch the customer to paid AVG products once the system has been recovered."