You don’t see many new product offerings dealing with spam, phishing, and virus control. The reason is that there are about 10 major players slogging it out — firms such as Symantec, Sophos, McAfee, Trend Micro, and so on. Smaller fry are tending to die, or be acquired.

So we learned with interest about Anchiva Systems. This new company has a spyware, virus control, and spam control offering. Highlights are:

• It’s provided as an appliance.
• Support for STMP, HTTP, POP3, FTP. Instant messaging support is being developed.
• 18 months old.
• Over $10 million in VC funding.
• U.S. sales started in April 2006.

Anchiva believes its main selling points are:

• Faster performance — important for boundary solutions.
• The various types of malware control are well integrated, as is the support for the different vectors.

… David Ferris

Shared file systems used to be, and still are, common places to keep shared information. Shared email folders are another place to keep common information.

Teamspaces (e.g., Microsoft SharePoint) contain a lot of structure. Among other things, they have a file store. As users get familiar with teamspaces, they often find that teamspaces are a more natural place to save files than in file servers. This intuition is often well-placed. Teamspaces will be important information repositories.

In many ways, consumers are leading the way here with the use of social teamspaces, such as Myspace.

… David Ferris

Teamspaces contain a lot of valuable information, so they need good backups. Backup systems designed for teamspaces — that understand the structures involved and other metadata — are hard to find. Understanding of structure and metadata is important in a backup system if it is to work efficiently.

This has to change, and will change — for example, Quest is working on a backup and restore system for SharePoint.

… David Ferris

There has been heated discussion in Web forums about Verizon’s allegedly aggressive spam management. Verizon is said to have blocked all mail from some ISPs in Europe and Asia, and its complaint handling has been sharply criticized.

Generally, this debate gives a clear message to ISPs. Home customers appreciate a spam-free mailbox, but they don’t want policies so harsh that they don’t receive email they actually want. As ISPs increase the aggressiveness of their spam filters, the law of diminishing returns sets in. This causes many more false positives.

People who work or run businesses from home can’t afford to lose business-related mail. However, even recreational users don’t like to think they may lose mail from family and friends because of oversensitive filtering.

… David Harley (editor: Richi Jennings)

Microsoft’s SharePoint teamspace offering has gathered a lot of interest over the last 12 months.

SharePoint is still a young product, and customers have much to gain from a market for third-party products. This is quickly appearing. Mostly, it’s small firms with specific niche tools and firms doing application development.

The first major software vendor to enter the field is Quest (2,800 staff, $476 million in revenue in 2005). Quest is developing a series of SharePoint lifecycle support products, providing for teamspace discovery and browsing, configuration and management (e.g., systemwide policy enforcement, and backup and recovery), and reporting. The first offering, Discovery Wizard for SharePoint, was released in February, and is available at no cost.

… David Ferris

Who are the main vendors of messaging management tools for Exchange?

Not too long ago, the leaders were BMC (Patrol) and NetIQ. However, Microsoft beefed up its offerings and reduced the demand for NetIQ, which was recently acquired by Attachmate.

The leaders today are Microsoft (MOM) and Quest (Spotlight on Exchange and MessageStats). Quest has taken steps to integrate its solutions into MOM, which is a smart approach to being both a competitor to and partner with Microsoft.

… David Ferris