Antivirus Vendor Joins Spam-Fighting FrayAntivirus Vendor Joins Spam-Fighting Fray

With companies facing an ever-growing influx of spam, Trend Micro Inc. on Monday began extending its considerable content-security muscle with the release of its first spam-fighting service for businesses, leveraging the knowledge base of anti-spam vendor Postini Inc. Through a technology partnership with Postini, Trend Micro has launched a service that's fed by Postini's work in the area of heuristic analysis, an approach to spam-fighting that uses statistical probability to determine whether a message is likely to be spam.

One of the dominant players in the antivirus market, Trend Micro's new spam-prevention service for enterprise networks is its first significant foray into fighting spam, and its pedigree makes it a potential impact player, says Aberdeen Group analyst Dana Gardner. "Trend does have a strong track record," Gardner says. "It's a natural fit for them to expand their purview."

By packaging its Postini-powered anti-spam service as a component that can easily be integrated with its gateway antivirus software, Trend Micro wants to provide customers with centralized management of their antivirus and anti-spam efforts, product manager Jeani Boots says. Boots adds that customers have told Trend Micro that while stopping spam at the gateway is great, it's far less valuable if IT managers can't get a unified report on antivirus and anti-spam activity. "The tighter we can integrate virus, spam, and content security, the better value we can bring to the customer," she says.

Trend Micro chose to partner with Postini because of its heuristic approach, says Dan Glessner, senior director of marketing. He says that with studies indicating that two-thirds of spam is new, other approaches that involve collecting spam and then comparing incoming messages to those already-flagged examples are becoming less effective because spammers keep changing their tactics.

The initial version of Trend Micro's offering is available for servers running Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system. A Windows version is expected in about a month, with a Linux version due a month or so after that. By year's end, Trend Micro plans to release a version that can run on a gateway server side by side with the vendor's antivirus and content-security software, and Boots says the company is working to ensure a smooth--and free--upgrade path for customers who want to get the service in place now and then move to the subsequent version. Pricing for the service, which includes regular Postini updates supplied by Trend Micro, ranges from $30 per user for a 25-user deployment to $4 per user for large enterprise subscriptions.