Microsoft’s purchase of FrontBridge Technologies makes sense in today’s security conscious world.
Microsoft has decided to enter the managed email services business with an announcement that it is to acquire FrontBridge Technologies, a privately held email management company headquartered in California, US. With additional offices in Canada, and Europe, FrontBridge has steadily acquired some 3,700 customers across many different verticals, and counts some 20% of the Fortune 100 among its customers. So yet again Microsoft acquires a business with a tried and tested product; enabling it to offer a solution to a problem that it unwittingly helped create in the first place.
Corporate email systems, such as Microsoft’s Exchange Server and IBM’s Lotus Domino, encounter daily bombardment from unsolicited commercial email (that’s spam to you and me), computer viruses, and phishing attacks, and although most organizations have now deployed some combination of email hygiene products, the ongoing maintenance and management of these tools and technologies still presents something of a headache for the corporate IT manager, who is also trying to deal with compliance and business continuity issues.
The acquisition of FrontBridge will clearly provide Microsoft with a nice little earner, but it will also provide a great many of its customers with an integrated service that will address email security – antivirus, anti-spam; compliance – archiving, content filtering, encryption, reporting; and business continuity – increased email up-time, and disaster recovery.
We will have to wait and see if the FrontBridge acquisition has any impact on Microsoft’s plans for Exchange 12 (due in 2006), but in the meantime this e-mail management service will help to protect what has become a business critical service operating in a hostile world. Corporate email systems continue to be the most vulnerable part of any organization’s IT infrastructure, and so an ‘armed frontier’ is a must for all companies using this most powerful of communication channels.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
