Iomart cashes in on rivals' desertion of email security market

Managed hosting provider claims it has attracted an array of new business over the past few months

Managed hosting provider Iomart has claimed it is cashing in on competitors leaving the email-filtering market in the UK.

The firm, which has about 100 resellers in the UK, claims it has attracted new mail-filtering business worth over six figures since autumn last year.

It cites Google's withdrawal of its Postini service and Webroot's exit from the email market as key factors in its success in the market.

Iomart subsidiary Iomartcloud's chief technology officer Bill Strain said his firm is cleaning up where others have left.

"As a UK company that is committed to the market in the long term, we see ourselves benefiting as these players exit the market," he added.

"Part of the problem with Postini was that Google was looking to move new customers to Google Apps, and from a reseller's point of view, it just did not suit all of them as they did not intend to offer Google as a mail offering."

Iomart recently won a contract with Scotland-based Kilgraston School to supply its mail-filtering services after it switched from the Postini brand last year.

Gavin Muirhead, the school's IT manager, claimed a move to Google Apps was simply not possible after Postini's exit.

"We did not want to use the [Postini] replacement service Google Apps [offered] because we did not have the bandwidth. We were already running things such as Exchange in-house, so we chose Iomartcloud's spam filtering," he said.

"Historically, we were getting more spam than actual email. We no longer have to trawl through hundreds of emails to find the one that is important."