For those of you not completely familiar with this service it is an "In the network service" where inbound email is redirected to a 3rd party data centre where the email is scanned for SPAM, Viruses and then returned all clean and shiney.
Whilst it is not to be confused with email hosting by a service provider, many of the large email hosting providers like Cobweb offer the service as an option.
The largest gainer was Messagelabs, whose extensive partnerships with the likes of Verizon, Star, HP and IBM has added greatly to their global market reach; as shown by their strong gains in the USA over the last 12 months.
Amongst FTSE 350 companies the increase is most noticeable, use of hosted mail security services jumped 80% from 135 companies to 244 in 12 months.
Microsoft made the fastest market entry amongst these major UK corporates; having launched in Europe in early 2006, Microsoft gained 5% share from a standing start. Seeing the future Microsoft acquired Frontbridge in 2005 and have been marketing it under their Managed Hosted Exchange brand..
BackChannel released our first Hosted Email Security market in June 2006. We now measuring the actual use of these services by FTSE, DAX, CAC and Fortune 1000 companies around the world, amongst 68,000 businesses in the UK, and plan to extend this to other regions in the near future.
Note: In this blog we're talking explicitly about hosted email security but for those of you interested in the whole subject of email hygene here is a link to the Gartner Magic Quadrant report for 2006.
