There is not enough room in the market for the current number of anti-spam companies.
There are literally dozens of companies promising to tackle spam and it’s easy to see why. About 40% of all email is believed to be spam, and building the basic technology – email filters – is relatively straightforward.
But there simply is not enough room in the market for all these companies, and the best that most can hope for is a quick acquisition by a bigger player in a related field such as anti-virus software, or by an ISP. Those that survive independently are likely to be those that can carve out a niche in the consumer segment, or have a unique killer technology.
In less than two years from now, accurate spam filtering in the enterprise market will be an expected component of an anti-virus or content-filtering solution, or any type of email gateway. Most of the players in both those fields are already moving in that direction.
With the anti-virus market mature and virtually saturated, an anti-spam company will have to have a better value proposition than a slightly higher level of spam-finding accuracy to make customers part with their IT dollars.
The consumer market may prove to be a different animal. Whereas businesses may be reluctant to allow their ISPs to filter email for them for fear of losing important information, consumer ISPs are more likely to offer it as a value-added service to subscribers. But most of the new spam-filtering firms are not targeting the service provider space, which is currently dominated in the US by one first-moving incumbent.
The spam problem is getting worse, and while the solutions are getting better they will never be 100% effective. But nobody expects a spam-free world, just manageable levels. This will be offered before too long by anti-virus firms, ISPs, and content-filtering software companies. A few pure-play anti-spam firms will survive, a handful more will be acquired, and the rest will fade away.
Source: Datamonitor/Computerwire
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