Webroot Migration - where their customers went

In 2012 a pretty successful hosted email security company called Webroot did the unthinkable they dumped their core product effectively saying it was "... no longer necessary".  Brave move or madness we're not really here to judge but we did decide to follow up with Webroot's customers and see if their customers shared the view that they no longer required a Cloud based mail security service 18 months later.

As you can see of the 3,810 Webroot customers we tracked 68% of them moved to a competing product.  Amongst Enterprise customers that figure was over 75%.  Webroot themselves now direct their mail via MS Outlook 365.  

Footnote - I've used the Webroot desktop product and it works fine, this exercise was undertaken purely to demonstrate the ability of our big-data engines to haul interesting and useful data.

South African Hosted Email Security Update

Back in January we reported that Mimecast had taken control of the South African market after having grown at an extraordinary rate for the previous 18 months, We 1st identified Mimecast as a rising star 3 years ago when they 1st came to the notice on the world stage taking market share in Europe, Australia & North America.  

Mimecast has definitely been an organisation to watch over the past two years. We think its continued growth is indicative of both its presence as a growing force within the worldwide cloud-based email security services landscape as well as the uptake in remotely managed product offerings within the South African market

Market penetration for cloud-based email technologies is particularly high in South Africa at 33%. In fact, the country is up there with first world territories such as the US,UK and Scandinavia, all well known for their openness towards new technologies and services.

Six months on the July 2012 BackChannel reports shows that Mimecast's market share growth has continued to accelerate, extending its installed base by 170% over 2 years, a strong performance even against an overall market growth in South Africa of a not-too-shabby 40%.

We think the vendor landscape in South Africa is a microcosm of ICT worldwide in general, showing that focus is almost certainly the key to winning in a technology marketplace. The fact that Mimecast focuses on what it does best. Competitors have fallen to the wayside due to a lack of emphasis on core service offerings; in comparison, Mimecast has continued to offer premium products and services which meet customer needs. That’s why they are the market leaders in South Africa and increasingly on the world stage.

Distribution of sales of email Hygene Services USA 2008

For the last 5 years we at BackChannel have been tracking the use of email hygiene services by organisations around the world.
We started with Messagelabs - now Symantec.cloud, Frontbridge - now Microsoft, Postini, MXLogic - now McAfee, Blackspider - now Websense in the USA and UK.  Over the intervening years we went on to include new and upcoming players like Google, Mimecast, Trend & zScaler and our range of deeply profiled regions expanded to 17 including France, Germany, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Scandinavia.
Today we track the use of 40+ services by over 1 million organisations in upwards of 50 countries.
We are proud to have been able to help many of these companies achieve  sales and business development goals and in some cases to support company valuations and investment rounds.
We will shortly be releasing our January 2012 Analysis of the use of these services and we will post our findings for the Fortune Global 500 companies here on this blog.
In the mean time here is a fun interactive 2008 chart showing state by state distribution of the sales by those key players. Have fun comparing them and pondering on why Messagelabs was strong on the East Coast and Postini in the West.


2008 USA email hygiene service sales, by state.

Those of you who know us well may know that we also profile the use of all major telecoms services including Access, Hosting and CDN services.  So if you are interested in the services used by a customer or competitor, if you are selling into these markets or if your a CIO who wants to know what their company really buys around the globe; why not contact us on +44 (0)1223 968481 and see what an innovative  Cambridge company can add to the mix.

Google polishes up Chrome to support GoogleApps

Whilst it has been slow to take off in Europe and the rest of the World, GoogleApps for Business have been as huge success in the US. In Mid 2007 we electronically surveyed 550k US companies to see who was using GoogleApps mail services and it hardly hit the Radar.


Re-running the Survey in Mid 2008 the results couldn't have been more different. GoogleApps had arrived, and the demographic is right in the heart of the US business, companies with between 20-250 employees.

You're probably all Google Chrome'd out by now but a significant part of the Chrome announcement is that it has an application development kit called Gears that allows Web App Developers; like ourselves, Salesforce, etal, to build Off-line features into our products, making them portable.

For Google, this means that users of GoogleApps for Business will soon be able to compose a Gmail that includes a GoogleApps Spreadsheet sitting on a plane, and have it sync up and send as soon as they are connected to the Internet again.

Security Industry Blog: Infosecurity Show, London

Due to our backgrounds being in information security inc' ISS, CESG and CheckPoint; we've have been invited (with promises of beer) to guest blog for Security consultancy 360is, so here is the first one - looking at the run up to Infosec London and reports on the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

Google and Postini Senior Execs Talk about the Acquisition

It's worth a trip printing off the charts below and heading over to ZDNets Blog to listen to Dave Girourd, vice president and general manager, Google Enterprise, and CEO, Postini Scott Petry, founder, CTO and exec VP of product development, talk about the thinking behind the acquisition and the integration of Postini.





It gets a bit nerdy in places but is worth listening to get a view of how the combined company plans to interoperate with other alternative application vendors such as the Mozilla Foundation, and to make the experience for the serious business user, well 'more serious'.

Google to acquire Postini leading US Mail security vendor

Breaking news in the informartion security area is that Google is to acquire the US leading email security vendor Postini .

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.