Ipswitch Acquires MessageWay

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Yesterday, Ipswitch announced the acquisition of MessageWay, a managed file transfer (MFT) company based in Livonia, Michigan. Ipswitch has offered file transfer solutions for many years and was named by Gartner as a leader in the company’s Magic Quadrant for Managed File Transfer in September 2009. The company has clearly boosted its position in the MFT space with this acquisition given that MessageWay’s MFT solutions are designed for high volume file transfer applications in the large enterprise (Global 2000) and service provider markets.

Why is MFT important? Among the many reasons are two key ones: first, while many users focus on email as a transport mechanism for business-critical content, the fact is that the vast majority of B2B content is actually sent using file-transfer systems, not email, including a large and growing number of application-to-application and application-to-human transfers. This means that many organizations are relying on FTP or other systems that may not provide the throughput or performance they need. Second, the consequences of data breaches can be enormous, reaching millions of dollars for a single data breach. Many existing file transfer systems simply are not capable of providing the appropriate level of security for B2B content transfer.

While MFT is often about changing existing processes to make them more efficient or less costly, these system can also create new revenue opportunities, as well.

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