In April this year Postini and Google announced a strategic tie up for the consumer oriented Gmail.
Now (July 9th) it is announced Google will acquire Postini for $625 million in cash, subject to working capital and other adjustments, and Postini will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google.
Dave Girouard, Vice President and General Manager of Google Enterprise. said "The response to Google Apps has been tremendous, with more than 1,000 small businesses signing up for the service every day. At the same time, large businesses have been reluctant to move to hosted applications due to issues of security and corporate compliance. By adding Postini products to Google's technology, businesses no longer have to choose -- employees get the intuitive products they want, and the company achieves the security and assurance it needs,"
CEO Eric Schmidt commenting on the addition of Postini to the Google Apps portfolio said "With this transaction, we're reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes. With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users -- they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations,"
The news comes as this sector hits hypergrowth. As second quarter of 2007 saw a hockey stick in the adoption of managed hosted mail security, it also saw Googles arch rival Microsoft growing deployments of the Exchange Hosted Services Portfolio based around their strong Frontbridge solution.
This strategic move by Google looks to have slipped them ahead of the game;
Here is the market share data for use of these services amongst some of the worlds largest corporates. The FTSE350 and the Fortune 1000.
As you will see, we left the old names on but here for completeness...
Postini = Google, Frontbridge = Microsoft, BlackSpider = Websense and Messagelabs well there still Messagelabs.
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