An interesting concept is rapidly making the rounds in the UK, via email, as a result of the recent London bombings. You put an entry in your cellphone called "ICE", which stands for "In Case of Emergency". Then you put in the number of a next of kin. The email is below. It’s a good idea.

It looks as if this may catch on. If so, it’ll be useful if you get hurt and others need to contact your next of kin.

If the ICE idea does catch on, it won’t be long until the ICE entry encompasses much more than just a cellphone number. It’ll also contain name, landline phone, email address, and possibly other communications information such as instant messaging addresses. And the entry will be in other communications devices, too, such as your email address book, and perhaps landline phones.

Author: David Ferris, with thanks to Ruth Skipper and Malcolm Tulloch

Russian anti-spam vigilantes are a tough bunch. Not that we’d advocate this approach to reducing the global spam problem, but it’s a wonder that this hasn’t happened before. The Mosnews has the details: http://mosnews.com/news/2005/07/25/spammerdead.shtml.

Author: Jeff Ubois, headline courtesy Nina Davis

A weakness of many mobile messaging platforms, including RIM’s, is the lack of universal access to public IM networks. Wireless carriers are selective about which, if any, of the consumer IM services they allow devices on their networks to connect with. Their aim is to protect the revenue they derive from subscribers using SMS text messaging.

Author: David Via

Many vendors now offer products that check that data (email messages, email attachments, HTTP Posts, instant messages) crossing the Internet boundary does not violate regulations, policy, or constitute data theft by an employee or hacker.

The sophisticated data analysis and matching technology employed by these products can also be employed by crawlers that inspect data stored on a variety of shared internal repositories. E.g., they can scan file servers, web servers, databases, and message stores.

This capability is valuable. E.g., it can show where confidential information resides, and possibly also whether it is accessible by internal staff that shouldn’t have such access. Expect vendors of boundary content analyzers to start providing this repository scanning capability. An early example is Vontu, with its Vontu Discover (http://www.vontu.com/news/release_detail.asp?id=313) subsystem, scheduled for September release.

David Ferris and Nick Shelness

The acquisition of Frontbridge by Microsoft certainly looks like its part of a pattern, but not the pattern you might think.

On one hand, Frontbridge looks like it’s part of the Microsoft pattern of acquiring companies in the anti-virus, anti-spam and security markets. The examples here are well-known: anti-virus from GeCAD, anti-spyware from Giant, and anti-spam and security from Sybari.

But look at it another way. It’s becoming a hosted, on-demand world. Certainly the Frontbridge acquisition validates the customer need for hosted email security and compliance. But also recall Outlook Live the offering from MSN where you can get the power of Outlook against the MSN service. That’s targeted at small business who may not have the resources to deploy and manage an Exchange server.  In addition, Microsoft announced that MS CRM 3.0< (Customer Relationship Manager) would be available either as a traditional software installation at the customer, or as a hosted service via partners, ala the popular salesforce.com

Microsoft has been making progress over the last several years working with hosted service providers and ISPs on licensing and packing for hosted Exchange server.  Based on recent events, that usage model seems to be getting more attractive for customers of all types.

Author: Chris Williams

For vendors of Linux-based email servers, the low hanging fruit are  at the low end: organizations with fewer than 250 seats. However, many of those organizations have little Linux expertise, so the key is for email vendors to work with VARs who can make these engagements a success. There’s an opportunity here for VARs to provide a "fit and forget" solution. Contrast this with a solution that the customer must tweak and fiddle with.

However, sales to smaller organizations have potentially higher cost of sales per mailbox. The key for vendors is to partner with VARs who will allow a business model to generate sufficient profit. We’ve seen the VAR model work at first hand, particularly in Europe. The challenge wasn’t the volume of prospects, but of keeping the cost of sales low enough.

The potential for selling to medium-to-large-sized organizations also exists, but with much longer sales cycles. This can present a different challenge to under-funded vendors.

Author: Richi Jennings, with thanks to Hal Steger from Scalix and Dusan Vitek from Kerio for the idea

On July 20, Microsoft announced it will acquire Frontbridge Technologies. See http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul05/07-20FrontBridgePR.mspx.

FrontBridge offers a hosted email filtering service. You route your email though FrontBridge, and the service mainly cleans out spam and viruses. It can also encrypt and archive email. FrontBridge is one of the leaders in this field; its main competitors are MessageLabs and Postini. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed; we guess a price of perhaps $150M.

One thing that’s important about this deal is that it validates the hosted filtering space. Hitherto, many organizations have been resistant to allowing a third party to take over email filtering, often for security reasons. Microsoft’s acquisition will allay such fears. It will bolster revenues of all the hosted services.

Author: David Ferris