SurfControl, as its name suggests, became successful by providing tools that control what Web sites you can access.
It has gradually been extending its control technology to other vectors. In mid-2006, for example, it acquired BlackSpider, a hosted (or "managed") service that filters email, IM, and Web traffic for viruses and spam. At that time, BlackSpider revenues were growing at 40% annually.
The firm's mainstay is still URL filtering, but it has a growing portfolio of technology of interest to the messaging manager. Here's a quick review of the company's Email Filter.
In a nutshell:
- Scans inbound and outbound mail.
- Mostly scans SMTP streams, although it can also scan Exchange traffic in small organizations.
- Virus and spam control.
- Policy definition and enforcement modules. Architecture centers around conventional regular expression pattern matching, and dictionary look-ups. Scores are gradually built through various tests, and actions are triggered when a threshold is reached.
- Sold exclusively through channels -- VARs, systems integrators, etc.
The main competitors are:
- Software solutions: Symantec, Microsoft
- Services: Postini, MessageLabs, Microsoft
- Appliances: IronPort, Barracuda, Symantec
Most customers have between 200 and 2,000 employees, and marketing is aimed at this size group. Typical pricing for 1,000 users is around $15/user/year for spam, virus, and content control.
The product has been available since 2002. SurfControl believes its major competitive strengths are:
- Dictionaries. You get an extended group of lexicons, used for content classification, and these are available at no charge. For example, these help you comply with HIPAA and GLBA.
- URL Checking. There's good detection of URLs pointing to nasty sites. This clearly leverages SurfControl's strengths in the Web filtering arena, enhanced by the technology from the BlackSpider acquisition.
- Reporting. You don't just see high-level spam and virus trends. For example, there are reports on compliance of outbound email policies and who's triggering them; users can also generate their own reports. You can easily drill down for further information, and the system integrates with Active Directory.
SurfControl is a public firm. It's doing about $115 million in annual revenues, with 620 staff. Websense plans to acquire it in early October.
... David Ferris and Richi Jennings