Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 7, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Google has announced its entry into the email security business and presented a range of offerings primarily for business customers. The technologies used come from the portfolio of security-service specialist Postini, which Google acquired in July 2007. Business customers of all sizes are being targeted; services are available from three dollars per user per year and work with all mail systems.
Google’s services can be used with all common mail systems, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell Groupwise. The basic “Google Message Filtering” offering searches for incoming spam and malware and costs three dollars per year. A further tier additionally offers improved virus detection, content-rule management and analysis of outgoing emails. The complete service, including archiving, storage and searching of message data, costs 25 dollars per user per year. In price terms, the offerings are therefore a clear declaration of war on Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Services, whose basic package costs 21 dollars per user per year.
In the Microsoft Exchange field, the offering competes with Microsoft’s own approaches. “MS Exchange offers many filtering options out of the box, for example through contact whitelists,” Microsoft security spokesman Gerhard Göschl says in response to an enquiry from pressetext. With several levels of expansion, Exchange Hosted Services are similar to Google’s offering. Microsoft offers other expansion options, however, and does not rely only on its own products. ForeFront Security for Exchange Server, for example, permits the simultaneous use of several antivirus solutions from different manufacturers for optimum malware protection, as Göschl emphasises.
Analysts have quite different views of the market potential of Google’s offerings. “I think what Google is doing is initially retaining the Postini customer base,” says Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus Research http://nucleusresearch.com to InformationWeek. Several other IT insiders also suspect repositioning rather than genuinely new offerings. Some IT analysts nevertheless see definite potential in Google’s offerings, particularly among small and medium-sized businesses. Little interest is expected only among large enterprises.
Only in January, IBM announced Lotus Protector for Mail Security, a product for the messaging-security field. In this connection, Gartner analyst Peter Firstbrook had stated that IBM was probably seeking a cooperation with or takeover of a hosted-service provider such as MessageLabs http://www.messagelabs.com in order to compete more directly with Microsoft and Google. However, by acquiring an email-security specialist, IBM would probably have secured competitiveness faster and more effectively would have. Gartner currently advises only companies that use Lotus to consider IBM’s security solution.
