With paltry pricing that's tough to beat, RAE Internet is making waves selling its anti-virus solution developed in Bucharest, Romania. The latest company to buy into the program is network-savvy New Edge Networks.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [November 27, 2002]

White Plains, N.Y.-based RAE Internet, sole U.S. distributor for RAV Anti Virus (Reliable Anti Virus), a product of GeCAD Software of Bucharest, Romania, announced that it has won national backbone New Edge Networks as a customer.

The RAV AntiVirus product was developed by GeCAD about ten years ago. "Most AV products contain code from a variety of developers," notes Mike Katz, President of RAE Internet. "The companies made acquisitions, for example. GeCAD developed all of the code for RAV."

In addition to anti-virus, the product comes with spam protection, a content filter, and a mail stamp attachment that allows corporate customers to append a specific text item to every outgoing e-mail.

The product is compatible with a wide variety of mail servers and operating systems including:

• Sendmail
• Sendmail Libmilter
• Qmail
• Postfix
• Stalker Software's CommuniGate Pro
• Exim
• Microsoft's MS Exchange 5.5
• Microsoft's MS Exchange 2000
• DMail
• Courier
• Insight Server
• Novell's Groupwise
• IBM's zSeries Linux

RAE Internet provides a detailed support page with how-to guides that illustrate the product's ease of use (when tweaking the product's configuration, administrators will generally be dealing only with text files).

The support page features a "click to talk" button, so we clicked on it. An instant messenger interface appeared and we explained we were doing an evaluation. The support person said "check this out," demonstrating that no matter the question, they could bring up the relevant help file on our desktop.

RAE Internet sells to ISPs of all sizes, and lists many of them of its website. New Edge is one of RAE Internet's newest and largest customers. Others include Vigoris of Broken Arrow, Okla. and Mid-Maine Communications of Bangor, Maine.

Conneautt Telephone of Conneautt, Ohio, is another common type of RAE Internet customer. The company has been a regional exchange carrier since before 1900 (it published its first telephone directory in 1897), and the company has recently branched out into Internet and cable TV services.

Katz says he feels he serves a niche market that consists of fringe operating systems and open source mail servers. The product is priced to please that niche market.

"ISPs don't want a corporate solution," says Katz, "and they certainly don't want to pay corporate licensing fees. I've worked with ISPs for a long time, initially at Cisco, and I know they run the gamut from large to small. Every small town has an ISP—most other companies don't see that. Small ISPs are in business and they're always going to be there."

Pricing and availability
RAV Anti Virus from RAE Internet is priced starting at $300 for 2 domains and at under $10,000 per server for an open license. Maintenance and updates are about 20 percent of the purchase price each year.

The product is available from RAE Internet's resellers, many of whom are small businesses.

"If an ISP is interested in our product," says Katz, "they can start by protecting their e-mail domains for just $300."

—End