Company pushes into anti-virus market with Microsoft Client Protection Microsoft sketched its security road map last week, detailing new products while avoiding talk of ship dates.Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Mike Nash, vice president of Microsoft’s security business and technology unit, held their press conference in Germany, unveiling an anti-virus product for businesses called Microsoft Client Protection, an anti-virus tool for Exchange, and a multivendor security consortium.Client Protection will combine both anti-spyware and anti-virus capabilities and will be in a beta by year’s end. In 2006, a beta anti-virus product — derived from the 2005 Sybari Software acquisition — will arrive under the name Microsoft Antigen for Exchange.Ballmer and Nash also announced the SecureIT alliance, a consortium of 30 vendors, including McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro, focused on securing the Microsoft platform.With release dates for the products still to come, customers will just have to wait, said Michael Cherry, a Windows analyst at Directions on Microsoft. “We still really don’t know the time frame for when they’re going to be delivered,” he said. “The big question in my mind is: What is the real road map?” SecurityMalware