The spam problem has been profoundly obvious for some years, and despite a seeming lull early 2006, volumes came back with a vengeance toward the end of the year. The market is quite mature, estimated at a billion dollars a year and growing, yet it continues to support dozens of vendors.
But with IronPort, Cisco also got its hands on one of the industry’s few IP reputation services, SenderBase, and that is a market that arguably did need some validation — a technology supported as it is by a mere handful of vendors.
Reputation services keep a real-time eye on the sources of email attacks, and score senders by IP address. Users can use this reputation data to drop spam traffic based on source IP before even the first SMTP message is sent, which can lead to up to 70% of spam traffic being blocked before it is received.
Over at Secure Computing Corp, a key IronPort competitor since its acquisition of appliance maker CipherTrust last year, company executives see opportunities in the the IP reputation service field, where Secure offers TrustedSource, a competitor to SenderBase.
The acquisition is waking up Cisco’s networking competitors, according to Secure chief strategy officer Jay Chaudhry, and that could lead to some useful partnerships. Cisco getting into the space helps Secure’s chance at working with Cisco competitors, he indicated.
Secure already licenses TrustedSource to F5 Networks Inc, which has integrated the service into its Big-IP load balancing devices. That deal, announced in November, was Secure’s first, but Chaudhry said that the company has similar deals in the works.
TumbleWeed Communications Corp currently competes with IronPort and Secure in the email appliance space, but has yet to launch any kind of IP reputation service. That’s set to change this year, according to TumbleWeed chief executive Jim Scullion.
We plan to launch that this year… in the first half, he said. TumbleWeed also wants to get into messaging security as a managed service, he said. He indicated that it would be in-house technology, either through development or acquisition.
As for Cisco, the IronPort deal has yet to close, so the company does not want to talk in too much detail about product integration plans, but there are indications that SenderBase could end up in more products than just email security.
If you look at IronPort, they really are almost a microcosm of our approach of enabling the network as a platform to provide more network services, said Jeff Platon, vice president of marketing in Cisco’s security group. Using SenderBase in more places is certainly and interesting area of investigation, he said.
