Frankly my dear, I don't give a spam
As email filtering offers a new source of revenue, expect the market to hot up, writes Bob Tarzey
Keeping unwanted spam away from businesses is a problem that is growing rapidly. As is the number of vendors with products for solving the problem. To a greater or lesser extent, these vendors have helped their customers to get the problem under control.
Many businesses are still filtering email and killing spam in-house, using either software installed on their mail server, or by installing specialist hardware (appliances) at the network edge.
Others are choosing to keep spam at bay by outsourcing the problem and subscribing to a hosted filtering service. The market for these services is about to hot up, as more vendors set up in Europe and seek resellers.
Until roughly a year ago, the market for hosted email filtering had not followed the usual pattern for IT products, where a vendor expands from its home market and seeks to go global. Instead, different vendors had become entrenched in Europe and the US but were not, on the whole, competing globally.
Two things have happened to change this. Firstly, the two main US vendors, Postini and Frontbridge, have set up in Europe. Secondly MessageLabs, the vendor with the lion’s share of the European market, has refocused its global partnership with IBM Global Services on the mid-market.
Frontbridge arrived in Europe about a year ago but has had limited success, finding it hard to attack the hegemony of local vendors, which, besides MessageLabs, include smaller firms such as BlackSpider and niche players like INSL/SpheriQ and Email Systems.
Postini, the largest US vendor, has only just arrived in the UK, but it is bullish about its chances. It has already attracted an impressive array of local resellers, some of whom are defecting from Frontbridge.
The reason for all this activity is that the vendors need to find new sources of revenue.
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Frankly my dear, I don't give a spam
As email filtering offers a new source of revenue, expect the market to hot up, writes Bob Tarzey
One way is to expand their portfolio, which Frontbridge has done by adding an email archiving capability to its service. Most hosted vendors now also offer outbound as well as inbound email filtering, ensuring that employees do not send out confidential or lewd material. In the past, businesses mainly used software products from other vendors for doing this.
Another way for the hosted service vendors to find new revenue is second-generation decisions. Many businesses took snap decisions to try and slow the flood of spam heading for their email servers. They are now reviewing these and are looking for more sophisticated capabilities.
The final way to increase revenue is to expand into new geographies, which Postini and Frontbridge have clearly done by coming to Europe.
MessageLabs, which has some US customers, hopes to gain a stronger global market share through strengthening its partnership with IBM. Much of continental Europe is green-field for these services and all vendors have their eyes on it, although in many cases they have to work out how to overcome local data protection laws.
For all the vendors the key to success is going to be finding resellers to penetrate the mid-market. Postini has struck a chord in the UK, where MessageLabs has in the past paid lip-service to resellers, but now says it has changed. Anyway, IBM will be pushing its re-badged MessageLabs service through via its own resellers.
But the market is over crowded, especially when there are other ways of solving the problem. Expect some fireworks as it continues to consolidate and evolve.
Bob Tarzey is service director at Quocirca.
(01753) 855 794
www.quocirca.com
Click here to see the illustrations associated with this article.