Vendor Name: 3Com
Date of Publication: February 21, 2005
Author: David Ferris
Source of Information: Trey Wafer, Product Manager
Quick Summary of Firm's Offerings. 3Com sells data and networking products, such as network interface cards and routers. 3Com Email Firewall is a new email hygiene appliance that sits at an organization's Internet boundary, and which is aimed at small and medium sized businesses.
Company Statistics
· # Full-Time Staff: 1900 total in 3Com
· Stock Market Status: Public: COMS
· Revenues: Total revenues as follows. $699M for FYE 5/28/04; $933M for FYE 5/28/03; $1,478M for FYE 5/28/02. No revenues yet for 3Com Email Firewall since it is not yet released
· Profitability: Substantial losses last three years
3Com Email Firewall
Product Name. 3Com Email Firewall, Powered by BorderWare
Product Functionality. Main functions are:
· Spam control
· Virus control
· Directory Harvest Attack protection
· Denial of Service attack protection
· Content and attachment controls based on headers, keywords, and message text
· Provide for buffer overruns
Platforms. It's an appliance
Competition
· Top Four: Barracuda, Symantec's appliances, new low end appliance offerings from CipherTrust and IronPort
· Others: Appliance vendorsSoftware products such as McAfee, Symantec, NetIQ, and hosted services such as Postini and MessageLabs
Release Date: March, 2005
Pricing
· Up to 100 users: appliance and one-year license-$2,799, additional one-year license and updates-$1,399
· Up to 250 users: appliance and one-year license-$4,999, additional one-year license and updates-$2,699
· Up to 500 users: appliance and one-year license-$6,999, additional one-year license and updates-$3,699
Main Plans--Next 12 Months:
· Add LDAP/AD-defined user groups
· Open sale of reputation services
· Add SNMP as well as 3Com management capabilities
· Add ability to communicate with higher capacity appliances (eg, BorderWare MX1000) to enable branch office-corporate office deployments
· Secure remote access with Web Mail and possibly others (OWA, iNotes)
· Under consideration: Ability to scale above 500 users. Implied in that would be some level of integration with 3Com routers & enterprise switches that would also combine traffic-shaping functionality.
Special Considerations Emphasized by Vendor
· Ease of installation
· Pricing compared to competition
· Technology covers both inbound and outbound scanning for no extra cost, unlike some competitors
For Further Information: www.3com.com, www.borderware.com
Other Ferris Research Comments
· 3Com has an established network of integrators and resellers. This may be a very effective channel for the product
· This is an interesting new opportunity for 3Com. It moves 3Com up the datacomms stack, from network-level technology to applications-level technology.
· 3Com sales and support staff are mainly network-oriented. 3Com is implementing a plan to inject know-how about email hygiene technology, but nevertheless field operations may find it hard to discuss the issues involved.
· As the full name suggests, 3Com is OEMing technology from BorderWare. This is a good move for BorderWare, which gains leverage through 1) 3Com's ability to sell, through its channel, to small and medium size businesses; 2) 3Com's international presence.
· The market for email hygiene appliances is established and growing at about 20% per quarter. Barracuda has been very successful in selling inexpensive appliances. Symantec recently announced two email hygiene appliances, the Symantec Mail Security 8100 and 8200 Series.
· The 3Com/BorderWare partnership makes sense for both firms. Overall, assuming a reasonably effective execution by 3Com, this product should do well and give Barracuda some interesting competition.