US antispam vendor Brightmail opened its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Sydney today and launched its suite of spam-blocking technology.
Gary Sexton, Brightmail's Asia-Pacific vice president, is heading up the Sydney office, which has five sales and support staff, and plans to take that to 10 people within six months.
Speaking at the opening, the company's president and chief executive Enrique Salem said Brightmail makes deployment of antispam software a straightforward process for IT managers by generating security updates on spam and viruses every 10 to 15 minutes to customer sites.
"Other vendors in this business simply provide an 'e-mail security' or 'antivirus' solution. Also, they only provide e-mail security updates once a week or month, and that's not enough," he said.
Officials said Brightmail's Logistics Operations Centres (BLOCs) are the key to its spam-stopping approach. Technicians, who manage server-side solutions in real time, staff the 24x7 centres to track new techniques that virus writers and spammers use. Those technicians "process spam that cannot be automated in the spam-fighting process", thus preventing false positives, officials said.
Within Asia-Pacific, Brightmail plans to open centres in Sydney and Taiwan at the end of the month and one in Toyko later this year, Salem said. Brightmail's core products include its antispam software (Enterprise and Service Provider edition) which integrates into existing corporate messaging systems. The tool catches more than 95 per cent of spam as it enters the network and delivers less than one in one million false positives, company officials claim.
The vendor also offers an antifraud service to help customers identify fraud or brand spoofing techniques such as phishing. By detecting that spam as soon as it is sent, the service alerts organisations to the problem and stops that message from reaching users in its customer and partner base.
Its latest service is Brightmail Reputation Service (available here from February 28) which helps customers authenticate the "reputation" of an e-mail-sender by identifying in real-time prime sources of spam, and ensuring e-mail from trusted sources gets delivered.
"The techniques spammers used two years ago were just plain text, but now they're employing more sophisticated methods using dynamic content like URLs or embedded code in their messages," Salem said.
"The Australian and New Zealand market has been growing rapidly in the last two years, particularly the ISP and telco market. They're the first types of organisations to receive and detect spam on the corporate networks of customers," he said. About 35 percent of Brightmail's business (currently worth $US30 million in total) comes from customers outside the US. Brightmail Asia-Pacific is expected to contribute a significant proportion of business to global revenues this fiscal year by signing up to 150 new enterprise customers from retail, financial services and government, according to Salem.
Brightmail's antispam software is priced at $50 per user per year for one to 49 users, and at $5.75 per user per year for 50,000 to 100,000 users, company officials said.