aiimALERT: Google Acquires Postini - Do No Evil?

Google recently announced  that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Postini, a provider of on-demand communications security and compliance solutions. Postini's services can be used to protect a company's email, instant messaging, and other web-based communications. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will acquire Postini for $625 million in cash. (press release)

On the surface, this acquisition seemed a bit bizarre. Why does Google need to get into the spam-filtering game? (This is Postini's primary capability - regardless of what's advertised) After all, Gmail and the "business version" in Google Apps has spam-filtering already, and MSN/Hotmail do as well.

However, as pointed out by Bill Burnham (a Venture Capitalist) writing over at AlwaysOn, this is a shot at Microsoft (primarily) and specifically Exchange. As Bill mentions again, this is not good news for other hosted spam/message-filtering companies - but Bill doesn't mention that Microsoft itself is already in THAT game as well. I've spent about 7 years covering messaging and far too much of that time covering spam-filtering solutions. In 2005 (announced in July, completed in August), Microsoft acquired FrontBridge, a similar player to Postini. Cutting to the chase, Google is firing multiple shots over at Microsoft, targeting both the recurring revenue stream (subscription) of the FrontBridge acquisition (will Google provide Postini spam-filtering for free?), and at the Exchange software model via Google Apps itself combined with the added functionality of Postini and it's broad offerings (beyond spam filtering, email encryption, etc.). Combine this with news covered in our aiimALERT on AOL today, and there is more fuel on the fire regarding the world of Web 2.0, hosted/on-demand services, and exactly who and how the bills are being paid for services (Google of course making most of it's money via advertising - for the moment).

Is Google setting up to become the overall on-demand provider across the board? Look out Salesforce.com et al, there's a distributed platform player in the market - and it's hungry for an on-demand world.

Comments

[Cap]

I think this goes to show the importance of online security in the business world. Now that Google has bought Postini, they will be able to services more businesses with their Gmail brand.

[Dan Keldsen]

Cap - I agree, partially. Having covered (and done) security from many angles for about a decade now, I can say that seriousness (from a business standpoint) has increased *somewhat* in the last 10 years, but we still have a long way to go.

Please contact me about your company (offline - dkeldsen *at* aiim *dot* org) though - we should talk.

Intellectual property leaking via the web is clearly an issue - and while sentiment analysis ala Nielsen Buzzmetrics has gotten marketers attention (a bit), and "brand police" offerings such as LTU have some interest, proactive searching out on the real world for specifically inappropriate/embarassing "leaked" documents doesn't get all that much airtime. Potential prevention of leaks in the first place, ala Orchestria, Vericept, Verdasys and the like has some takers - but the "horse has left the barn" scenario, not so much, in my experience.

Would love to continue educating the market though! Might make for intriguing live radio fodder... (hint hint)

[www.targ8.com]

Do no evil is an anagram of "o no devil". Why not try out targ8.com whos motto is dont google it, targ8 it. Just visit and you'll see why...