So Microsoft continues its inexorable march toward attempted world domination of the security space with the purchase of FrontBridge. Sierra Ventures, one of the VCs, must be happy.
What is FrontBridge? They are a managed services play for enterprise email security. You point your mail to them, they clean it, and it gets passed on to you all spiffy and clean. It’s complementary to their Sybari acquisition.
FrontBridge doesn’t use their own antivirus technology. Instead, they partner with Sophos, Kaspersky and Symantec for virus scanning.
They didn’t buy Postini (a heavyweight in this space), probably because the price was going to be too high. FrontBridge only had $10 mill in sales, whereas Postini is probably (I’m guessing) 4x that number.
Managed Services for email security is only used by certain types of enterprise customers — those that don’t care about someone else handling their email (security and control are issues).
Alex