News
In the Third Quarter of 2007, Commtouch licensed its email defense technology to nine new companies, the company announced yesterday. The Netanya-based company now has 82 OEM partners, many of whom, “represent companies providing managed services, secure messaging, and security hardware, among others.”
Background
Founded in 1991, Commtouch, is led by co-founders, CEO and Chairman, Gideon Mantel, and CTO and President, Amir Lev, and develops software to protect e-mail. According to the website, Commtouch provides “spam and Zero-Hour™ virus outbreak protection for 50 million users in 130 countries,” and its technologies “have been licensed by over 50 partners, including security and anti-virus vendors, managed service providers and messaging security providers.” Its anti-spam solutions feature its Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) technology.
What it does
Commtouch’s Recurrent Pattern Detection technology, as explained by Director of Product Marketing, Oren Drori, doesn’t “look at the content of each message,” but instead, “looks for recurrences of patterns in huge amounts of mail.” Basically RPD searches for recurring patterns and indicates spam that way.
Zero-Hour protection “complements traditional anti-virus solutions, and is designed to detect and identify email-borne viruses and malware by providing detection and blocking of viruses within moments of an outbreak, before traditional defenses kick in.”
Sample Partners
Barbedwire Technologies
Tumbleweed
The Electric Mail Company
Market and Future
Spam is an ongoing battle that is affecting the Internet and continually evolves making it hard in the past for anti-spam programs to fight it. According to analyst findings, there is a need to block spam for reputation protection, yet there are “high barriers to entry.” Barriers include having a “deep knowledge of email security, and access to vast historical and real-time information about global email traffic.”
While one can consider well-established companies, such as Symantec and McAfee as the leaders in the anti-spam and spam protection arena, smaller companies, such as Postini and Commtouch, have been able to create little niches and are clearly in demand. Postini was bought by Google a few months ago and Commtouch is continuing to gain momentum and as Mantel mentioned “these new agreements, together with our existing partner base, are laying the foundation for our future growth in 2008.”
According to Aaron Katzman’s analysis of this, “with over 58% of end-user organizations seeking new anti-spam vendors, the opportunity for Commtouch to grab market share is very real.” Additionally, recent alliances with industry organizations such as Image Analyzer and Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) shows Commtouch’s commitment to helping make a better Internet experience in the long run.
Additional resources
Commtouch and Postini
The Elusive Enemy by Amir Lev
Commtouch Software: CEO Mantel Has Regained His Touch
Commtouch in 1999
Commtouch Private Placement Secures $1.3 Million Funding; Company Pursues Turnaround Plan
