A company that may be the world's top anti-spam authority is offering its security service to major service providers at a price that significantly undercuts the competition.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 17, 2005]

Every time we talk to Outblaze, it's the scale of the operation that we find most impressive. The company, with U.S. offices in Riverside, Conn. and world headquarters in Hong Kong, provides e-mail, but in a very very big way.

Stef Bensi, managing director of Outblaze for the U.S. and Europe, provides the statistics. "Outblaze receives 80 billion inbound messages per month, which is about 2.5 billion per day. We reject over 90 percent of them, and process 200 million to 250 million each day."

It's easy to get 200 million messages if you're serving 40 million mailboxes.

SaaS Your Security
Now the company is offering a product that it's never offered as a standalone before, but which has been a key component since Outblaze was founded seven years ago.

Outblaze maintains a top quality team of anti-spam and mail protection experts in Hong Kong, led by Suresh Ramasubramanian.

Now, Outblaze is offering the e-mail security component of its service without forcing ISPs to get their e-mail through Outblaze. The product is called Sentry Perimeter.

"The ISP simply points their MX record to Outblaze and we scan the inbound and, optionally, the outbound mail and pass all legitimate mail through to the ISP's mail servers. With our real time protection, the ISP no longer needs to handle the peaks and troughs of message delivery. They might need to have equipment, if they find they can manage to the 80th percentile of demand instead of the 95th percentile."

When we point out that ISPs might not be comfortable with the idea of pointing their MX records to another company's servers, Bensi says that the economy is changing, and companies are putting more data on the Internet than ever before. "There's a general move to Software as a Service (SaaS). It's acceptable to outsource security, just like it's acceptable now to put all your best sales leads into a database on salesforce.com."

The company will have servers in the U.S. for U.S. customers, servers in Europe for European customers, and servers in Asia for Asian customers.

Bensi sees a global demand for the service. "It's becoming difficult for ISPs to deal with the real time nature (or demand) of protecting the network against spam and viruses. If you update every twelve hours, it could be too late. Spam and viruses both propagate quickly. Spammers look for a weakness in your network and then send half a million messages in 30 minutes. Daily or twice daily updates for anti-spam and anti-virus are not good enough."

Pricing and availability
Sentry Perimeter is available now to ISPs at prices starting at $1 per mailbox per month for 1,000 mailboxes, dropping to 10 to 20 cents per month—or even lower—for volume orders.

—End