The cash purchase of San Mateo, California-based Qurb, for an undisclosed fee, follows Islandia, New York-based CA’s acquisition of personal firewall technology vendor Tiny Software Inc in late June.
The purchase brings in-house technology CA has been licensing for its eTrust consumer product line since 2004, and will better enable it to integrate the email management technology with its eTrust Threat Management suite of products.
Qurb’s technology works with Microsoft Corp’s Outlook email client, from version 5.5 to 2003, and provides anti-spam functionality, as well as technology to protect users against phishing scam emails and other email-based fraud, and email search functionality.
Like the personal firewall technology CA acquired with Tiny, the purchase of Qurb will strengthen CA’s offerings for the consumer and small-to-medium business markets, as well as adding more options to its enterprise threat management suite.
Qurb’s technology will continue to be sold separately as eTrust Anti-Spam, which was officially released in June, and will also be further integrated with CA’s eTrust Threat Management Suite, which includes the eTrust Firewall, as well as the PestPatrol anti-spyware technology CA acquired in August 2004.
Qurb was founded in 2002 by Felix Lin, Linus Upson, and Dave Moore, formerly the CEO, CTO, and VP of engineering, respectively, of mobile content aggregation developer AvantGo Inc, which was acquired by Sybase Inc in December of that year. As part of the Qurb acquisition Lin becomes vice president of strategy for CA’s eTrust product line.
