On Message with Ben Gross

2006 is shaping up to be a defining year in the email security appliance market. In just the last two weeks, several major vendors have announced new products, new pricing, and new technology.
IronPort announced a new set of safeguards based on what it is called Web Reputation technology. Rather than simply examining message content to [...]

Email overload is hardly a new issue — CNN carried a story about it back in 1998 that could have been written today. Though there are far more people feeling pain of overload now, there has been surprisingly little progress towards any sort of cure.
Over the years, there have been a number of solutions suggested, [...]

Lotusphere is shaping up to be a hotter show than usual this year. Richard Schwartz is setting up a coordinated RSS feed for the 60 bloggers he expects to be at the conference. Ben Poole has a similar list.
IBM will be showing off Project Hannover, its next generation of Domino due out in 2007, as [...]

There hasn’t been a public total of VC investments in anti-spam companies in a while, but the recent $40 million round raised from Sequoia Capital and Francisco Partners may indicate a shift in the relative importance of the appliance vendors. Getting revenue data on private companies isn’t easy, but IDC recently estimated the company had [...]

My colleague Sameer Karmarkar of Persistent Systems, which just closed over $18mm in funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Gabriel Venture Partners, recently sent me a short note about why virtual directories need transaction support. Sameer says:
Virtual Directories are a great technology to facilitate convergence in the telecom industry. Telecom services and network convergence has [...]

The market research firm Radicati Group issued some new figures this week about the messaging market that are quite interesting. Radicati reports that “there are about 668 million email users worldwide, with over 1.2 billion active email accounts. Worldwide email traffic per day totals about 135 billion messages, of which 67% are spam.” Overall, “Spam [...]