Cluley argues that well-established second-tier AV shops including Sophos, Kaspersky Lab, Panda Software, and F-Secure -- that have been in the end-point protection business for years -- will still be able to carve out profitable portions of the overall security market.

The expert said that more than 70 percent of the new attack variants discovered by Sophos in the last year were found using automated tools such as the company's behavioral genotype technology -- which claims the ability to predict which programs are malicious before the applications themselves are ever run.

"There's absolutely no evidence that we can't compete with the 500-pound gorillas," said Cluley. "People have been saying that AV is a commodity for years, and it's true that many customers want integrated security tools, but the people who are saying that only the largest can survive are looking at modern AV in a very old-school way."

Some industry analysts agree that at least part of the AV commoditization debate is based in market nomenclature, since signature-base tools represent only one flavor of the integrated security applications being delivered by almost all "anti-virus" vendors.

Larger vendors may lead the way with the broadest array of security technologies in their suites, but the different varieties and combinations of tools being offered by many of the providers will still appeal to individual companies and customers of various sizes, said Chris Christiansen, analyst with IDC.

"AV is actually becoming end-point security, but for the sake of marketing some of the same wording is being used, even though all of these companies' products contain a far wider-range of capabilities that signature-base AV," he said. "Focusing on the sheer number of bodies that any one company has in the lab is missing the point; it's more of an effort to develop automated capabilities to recognize variants."

On Tuesday, Kaspersky Labs held an educational event for customers just outside of Boston, during which company founder and chief executive Eugene Kaspersky laid out the wide range of financially motivated threats that are being aimed at businesses and end-users, and told the story of building his one-man startup into the 800-employee organization it is today.

At the heart of the firm, he said, are Kaspersky's "woodpeckers," the virus researchers who spend their days picking away at the newest threats that arrive at the Russian firm's honeypots.

Confronted with the argument that the comparatively modest size of the company will serve as a handicap when lined up against its largest competitors, Kaspersky leaders said that the notion overlooks the realities of the market.

"It's not about headcount, it's about the quality of the people, it's about designing the systems to test the malware samples, and it's about the systems of delivery for getting the signatures to the end users," said Steve Orenberg, president of Kaspersky Lab USA operations. "There are such a wide range of factors that figure into the process; it's not all about the number of people you have looking at the attacks."

Orenberg said that Kaspersky Lab will continue to win new customers using its unique malware-hunting technologies, speedy virus update services, and its products' low impact on the system resources of the devices they run on -- all of which he lists as advantages over larger AV providers.

Eugene Kaspersky pointed out that AV market watchers have been making the same commoditization arguments for a long time -- even while his company has continued to grow -- and said that the most accurate anecdote to depict his firm's ability to compete with bigger players can be found in the world of automobiles.

"People have been saying that the only difference between the different AV systems is marketing and that the quality is similar, but I don't think that's ever been true," said Kaspersky. "The large AV companies out there are like Toyota, Ford, and GM, and the smaller companies like us are more like Lamborghini; the only difference is that we develop Lamborghini technology, but sell it for the same price as a Ford."