According to Tim Leisman, president and CEO of the company, to date the market has mostly been driven by issues around inbound traffic as a route for viruses and spam.
But he said there is much more interest now in outbound messaging security and issues of how best to secure content leaving an organization. Concerns over messaging security and compliance are really helping re-invigorate this sector. People are seeing that the real issue they face is how to manage content more effectively. Throwing point products at point problems to defend the perimeter is not enough, he said.
The company says it has pulled together a unified security platform that will defend against the multiple attack vectors of web, email, and SIP, the session initiation protocol which is becoming a significant protocol in the world of VoIP. It has been in the pipeline for 18 months or so, Leisman said, since the addition a couple of years ago to its MXtreme Mail firewall of management features that permitted centralized or tiered administration of more than one system.
The portfolio takes in its MXtreme mail firewall product to secure email traffic, the SteelGate firewall and VPN appliance for web and network defenses, and its SIPAssure SIP firewall for VoIP security. The company has had a firewall appliance aimed at securing VoIP for over a year, with the SIPassure gateway designed to protect against threats such as denial-of-service attacks, number spoofing, and the remote compromise of VoIP phones. It is designed to work alongside IP PBXs from the likes of Avaya and Cisco.
Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Borderware started out 11 years ago as a firewall vendor, moved into email security appliances, and is now extending its business footprint into the broader but still emerging IP security markets around instant messaging and VoIP. It wants to be known as an internet security communications company.
It still concentrates wholly on indirect sales and claims to have 8,000 of its appliances installed at customer sites that are serviced by 500 channel VARS and a long list of security and networking vendor partners that takes in Cisco, F5, Kaspersky Labs, McAfee, PGP, RSA, Symantec, and Ubiquity.
According to its CEO, the business is growing at a 40% growth clip having produced revenue last year of CAD 20m ($17.5m). The average deal size for its appliances runs to around CAD 40,000 ($35,000) and CAD 80,000 ($70,000).
Leisman said the company would be publicizing its latest products later this month at the RSA Security trade show, where it will also be promoting a prevent, control, and manage proposition. That is based on the Borderware Security Platform and an appliance set running the hardened S-Core operating system and handling various aspects of email, VoIP, IM, video, web, and network security.
The company competes with a bunch of email security vendors from CipherTrust and Clearswift, to Ironport and Symantec. One market differentiator is that the company has obtained EAL4+ certification for its MXtreme email firewall appliance line, classifying it as having the highest level of third-party certification for network security devices. Its email system is built to be highly available with message-level redundancy and on-demand clustering capability. It is ready to announce Version 6 of MXtreme.
