Google Becoming a Force in E-Mail Security for Smaller BusinessesGoogle Becoming a Force in E-Mail Security for Smaller Businesses

Google has been trying to parlay its search-centered success into becoming an even bigger player in the software supplier market. One recent point of emphasis has been delivering secure e-mail services to small and midsize businesses, an area of growing interest.

Search was not going to carry Google to its desired position: the industry's leading software supplier. So the company has been forced to branch out into other markets. Google has been trying to wedge its way into the corporate space by delivering enterprise messaging services. The company has been pushing its Google Apps business productivity suite and claims to have more than 500,000 customers. The product includes a handful of applications (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Google Talk) that compete mainly with products, such as IBM's Lotus Notes and Microsoft's Exchange.

Last summer, Google paid $625 million to buy Postini, a startup e-mail service provider with 40,000 business customers and 14 million users worldwide. One reason for the acquisition was that Postini followed the same business model as Google, delivering hosted solutions rather than packaged software to customers. Here a vendor trades the up-front licensing costs associated with most desktop software for a recurring revenue stream based on subscription pricing for Web-based business applications. In addition, the secure services meshed with Google Apps, which like other e-mail solutions, has been gaining functionality.

The Evolution of Messaging
In fact, messaging has been evolving from a simple way to transmit textual information to an application development platform capable of supporting a range of rich exchanges incorporating voice and video as well as data. In addition to offering richer interactions, e-mail exchanges have become more important. As companies become reliant on messaging as a primary way to exchange data, e-mail has become an important repository of corporate information, one that has to be carefully guarded.

Postini had grown its business by delivering products that let companies ensure that only legitimate information flowed into and out of their networks. The company's spam- and virus-filtering functions can be customized to different types of business users. In addition, enterprises can centrally manage content based on business policy rules.

Postini had delivered a high-end sophisticated service and charged a premium price for it. Google is following a different business model, one that emphasizes bulk rather than high-margin sales. Consequently, the search supplier revamped the Postini line, breaking its services into three categories, with different features and price points:

The new products should interest small and midsize businesses for various reasons. The lower pricing would enable more businesses to deploy lower-cost solutions. In some cases, data archiving functions have been too difficult and too costly to deploy.

What Can Be Done About Spam?
Spam continues to be an annoyance. While pundits, such as Bill Gates, once proclaimed that they would defeat spammers, that has not been the case. In fact, 2007 was the worst year on record, with market estimates ranging from 90% to in some cases, 99% of all Internet traffic being spam. Much of that increase came from the rise of botnets, networks of hijacked personal computers that spammers use to flood the Internet with tremendous volumes of spam. This technique allows spammers to send a virtually unlimited amount of spam at no cost by relying on tens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of compromised PCs to send their bogus messages.

Google does face challenges in trying to leverage its Postini services successfully. The high growth rates in the e-mail security market have meant that solutions are coming from a wide range of new and well-established sources. Software companies, such as McAfee and Symantec, continue to offer packaged solutions for businesses and consumers. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) have added spam-filtering functions to their network services. Many startup vendors have been trying to deliver these functions. Microsoft has been integrating spam-filtering functionality into its different desktop and e-mail packages.

Google's strategy to branch into secure e-mail should pay dividends. Because of its name recognition and the strength of the Postini line, Google should emerge as an important player in the secure e-mail space. However, additional moves will be needed to become the industry's leading software supplier.

What spam filtering solutions do you have in place? How effective or ineffective have they been? How much interest do you have in Google's products?

Paul Korzeniowski is a Sudbury, MA-based freelance writer who has been writing about networking issues for two decades. His work has appeared in Business 2.0, Entrepreneur, Investors Business Daily, Newsweek, and information.