GTB Technologies makes a data leak prevention product called GTB Inspector. It’s recently been revamped. Here’s a summary:

• Appliance dynamically scans all protocols and ports over a network link.
• Can log/quarantine/block/redact offending material.
• Policy-based encryption.
• Also scans endpoints; e.g., for downloads to detachable USB drive.
• Main competition: Symantec/Vontu, McAfee/Reconnex.
• Does real-time content checking so can catch material on the fly.
• Pricing: $20,000 for base unit, plus user pricing (e.g., $49.94/user for 500 users, $32.25/user for 10,000 users).
• Company is privately held.

Comments:

• The DLP market is still very small, despite plenty of hype. Most vendors have very small revenues. For example, one of the more visible players, Reconnex, was doing about $4M/year when it was sold to McAfee in late 2008. Ferris Research estimates that the market for DLP solutions does not currently exceed $100M.
• GTB was missed in the recent wave of acquisitions of DLP products, in which EMC/RSA acquired Tablus, Symantec acquired Vontu, Websense acquired PortAuthority, and more recently McAfee acquired Reconnex. Vericept and GTB are some of the independents left.
• CEO Uzi Yair believes the major strengths of the product are:
  • Greater accuracy than with competing technologies. This may very well be the case; with an hour’s demonstration of the product, we were unable to corroborate the assertion. If he’s right, this would be an important advantage. Inaccuracy is a major problem with today’s data leak prevention technology. We’re tentatively skeptical about the assertion of greater accuracy; we’d be delighted to be proven wrong.
  • The ability to block material in real time. Yair says his competitors can’t do this; they can only log offending material. We’re surprised at this, but if his assertion about the competitors is correct, we’d agree it’s an important strength.
  • The product scans all ports and protocols; Yair asserts, again to our surprise, that the competition doesn’t do this. If they don’t, they should.

… David Ferris

AtMail offers an email appliance:

• Provides POP/IMAP server, Webmail client, email archiving.
• Linux-based with open standard components.
• Pricing is a one-time license. Base product is $300; then per-user cost which is typically $0.10/user/year.
• Appearance can be customized.
• Professional services also available.
• AtMail is privately held, with no external funding, and is profitable. Ferris Research estimates revenues at $1M to $2M/year.
• Customers include ISPs, education, health care organizations.

Comments:

• You can see that this offering would be especially attractive to ISPs in developing countries, with extremely tight budgets. AtMail clients include ISPs in such places as Yemen, Rwanda, Pakistan, and often sends an engineer to customer sites for a week for implementation support.
• Your editor loves to go to developing countries and position with AtMail.
• This company sounds like fun. CTO Jason Brown lives in Montana, and CEO Ben Duncan likes to go off to the Australian outback with solar panels and satellite links. All the same, I bet they work very very hard.

… David Ferris

Exchange 2010 is the next version of Exchange Server. It is due for release at the end of 2009 or early 2010. Exchange 2010 includes many new features and enhancements for archiving.

It’s early days for Exchange built-in archiving, and storage management is an important area in which it falls short:

• It does not move archived email off the Exchange Server. Since email never leaves the Exchange Server, Exchange data protection, storage, and recoverability will all be adversely affected as the total Exchange storage increases.
• It (as well as all previous versions of Exchange) does not perform single instance storage across all of its stores. This means the email you archive in Exchange 2010 is not de-duplicated, which further compounds archive storage problems.

At last month’s TechEd, a Microsoft employee presented Exchange 2010 archiving and positioned the offering as a “personal archiving” solution and not an “organizational archiving” solution. This is correct. Today, an organizational archive must keep the archive data off-host, fully de-duplicated, and under full retention management.

Exchange 2010 archiving is a useful replacement for PST files and personal archiving. But it falls short of a true organizational archive solution. Today, only third-party solutions deliver all the features required.

… Bob Spurzem