Chris Miller, director of product management at the Cupertino, California-based security vendor, said the move was prompted by the expanded breadth of its email security options, a progression of its $370m acquisition of Brightmail Inc some 18 months ago. Brightmail offered anti-spam as a combination of managed service and premises-based software. Its main customers, in terms of seats, were the large ISPs, but the company also had a strong enterprise offering and about 1,800 customers.
Most enterprise users of Mail Security programs will be running the email-scanning software at the gateway, and some will be using Symantec or a service provider partner to host their mail-scanning services. But many organizations will be considering deployment as an appliance, Miller said, because of the low management overhead.
This move should accelerate that shift. We are offering a license that is multi-tier and multi-form factor. As well as offering choice of form factor, there will be discount benefits in the new enterprise license of around 25% over the cost of individual product licenses, Miller said.
Miller also confirmed that the new version 5 of Symantec’s Mail Security products for Domino and Exchange are ready for release this month, with improvements having been made to the granularity of filtering policy, so that filtering policies can be set according to users and user groups that are already defined in existing user directories. There are also new spyware and adware detection additions.
