Companies that are already successful abroad but are not yet successful in the US can be very useful to US companies. We describe a large security company working on growing its US presence.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [December 8, 2003]

Companies abroad look to the US market as the best opportunity in the world. Other countries have more people and may be growing faster. Europe, as a whole, has almost one and a half times as many people as the US.

But the US is still the tech market that companies want to enter. Companies that have valuable products and successful business abroad represent an opportunity for a wide variety of US businesses. PR firms that know who's who are interested in representing them and realtors rub their hands with glee at the prospect of finding office space for a well-heeled customer. One US webhost landed a huge contract to host the US presence of the world's largest online game.

For ISPs, the opportunity is often that a company accustomed to dealing only with the ILECs may be willing to work with slightly smaller companies. That appears to be the case with F-Secure, security provider for European ILECs. The company, based in Helsinki, Finland, has US headquarters in San Jose, Calif., not far from the recent ISPCON, at which the company had a booth.

Bo Sorensen, F-Secure's vice president of sales and marketing, says that the company's global business is doing extremely well. "Our latest results, for Q3 of this year, show over 20 percent growth per quarter for the past 10 consecutive quarters."

F-Secure is no newcomer to the US, but is not doing as well in the US as it is in Europe, where it serves many of the largest ISPs. "We've been here in the US since 1996," says Sorensen. "We have a firm base of customers in the government and financial sectors."

Building vaccines fast
Now, the company is reaching out to ISPs with what it says is a great product. "ISPs need to compete on quality of service, not price," says Obrey. One part of quality service is protection from security threats.

The company sells both gateway and client-side products. "Gateway anti-virus is not enough," says Obrey, pointing out that the Blaster worm was delivered through HTTP, not e-mail.

The company also sells a special product for small business e-mail management. "We market that as EIM: Employee Internet Management," says Obrey.

When new threats occur, the company reacts quickly. "We have, on average, been able to detect and protect in less than two hours," says Sorensen.

F-Secure is accustomed to working with large companies and has developed features that make large deployments easier. "Our product is also great for large server farms," says Sorensen.

"Initially, " explains Obrey, "ISPs deploy a registration server to link to our servers in Finald. Our unique backweb client utilizes unused bandwidth for updates and database downloads." The server can also send a license key to a customer who has just bought a subscription to the client-side product. It can store the company's virus definitions, which currently number over 60,000.

The next step is handling the first virus attack. Obrey says that F-Secure's true value becomes apparent when support calls are lower than expected. "Our software will tell the help desk what to do. One common problem is that you cannot have two anti-virus solutions on the same machine. Deutsche Telekom, using our software, has a 98 percent first kill rate on support phone calls."

In summary, Obrey says the product provides three key benefits ISPs are looking for. "1) A new revenue stream. 2) Low TCO, and low number of support calls. 3) It's easy to get up and running."

The toughest part of installation is integration with legacy billing systems. "Our last ISP install was four weeks because of that," says Obrey.

Owning the business
ISPs worried about handing customers over to another company can bundle F-Secure with their own service. "ISPs like the ability to manage their own client base," says Obrey.

Obrey says that ISPs deploying F-Secure initially see a takeup rate of about 25 percent. "Of course, we want to see 100 percent, but that usually takes a long time. We like it when ISPs provide our service to all of their customers."

ISPs that offer F-Secure as part of a bundle get to turn off F-Secure if the customer leaves the ISP.

The company is now working on adding parental control and anti-spam modules to its suite of services in early 2004. It also sells a commercial SSH product (see related articles, below).

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