New Appliance Announcements from IronPort, Mirapoint, and Tumbleweed

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 determine the likelihood of a message containing spam or malware, IronPort’s Web Reputation technology checks the URLs contained in email and IM traffic, and makes evaluations based on the reputation of the websites that are referenced.

Mirapoint announced that its new RazorGate series of appliances (the RG100, RG350 and RG500) can handle 40 percent more traffic, or up to nine million messages per day. RazorGate provides inbound and outbound filtering, zero-hour virus defense, and claims a .0001 false positive rate. Pricing starts at $4,475.

Tumbleweed announced availability for its MailGate(R) Appliance 4500 Series hardware, which also processes up to 375,000 messages per hour (i.e. 9 million messages per day), and provides antispam, antivirus, content filtering, policy management, and outbound encryption.

With the RSA show coming up next week, more announcements like these are probably forthcoming, though some market consolidation later this year seems inevitable.