Postini makes e-mail security simple for small businesses
Connect IT

30 March, 2005
By: Chris Talbot

Postini, a provider of e-mail security and management services, has released a small business edition of its enterprise e-mail security service. The new version of the service is meant to be easier to use for companies that don't have the IT resources of enterprises.

The Postini Perimeter Manager Small Business Edition has most of the same features available in the Enterprise Edition, but a few features that aren't applicable to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have been taken out, said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing at Postini. Since most small businesses don't have much in the way of IT resources, Postini has also taken a lot of the headache out of the activation and configuration processes. While SMBs are still able to fine-tune the service for their needs, Postini presets a lot of the configuration options for their SMB customers.

Like the Enterprise Edition, the Small Business Edition is managed service rather than a hardware or software solution that sits at the customer's location. The way it works is that customers' e-mail messages go through Postini's data centers, and Postini identifies spam, virus-infected and other kinds of junk e-mail, takes such e-mail out and then sends through the legitimate e-mail to the company. According to Lochart, currently only about 12 per cent of messages that go through Postini's data centers are actually sent on to the end-user.

"One of the things that characterizes small businesses is they have pretty scarce IT resources to address a problem like this," Lochart said.

The number of spam e-mails per person entering a business really depends on the size of the company. Odd as it may seem, the smaller the company is, the more spam per person the company is receiving, Lochart said. In fact, companies with under 100 employees receive up to 10 times as much spam per person as Postini's largest enterprise customers.

"Small businesses are sort of faced with this double whammy, because the problem is in fact worse for them. Each of their users is receiving more spam, or having more of it sent to them, and of course we're stopping it," Lochart said. "But if you're a small business and you don't have a defence in place, you're really in big trouble."

Many of Postini's existing customers are actually SMBs that are using the Enterprise Edition, Lochart said. After talking with those customers to find out their concerns with the Enterprise Edition, Postini created the Small Business Edition. The Enterprise Edition has a lot of power, flexibility and options, which the enterprise customers love, Lochart said. However, small businesses find it intimidating.

"They have a very simple e-mail infrastructure, and really what we designed the Small Business Edition for is the business with one mail server," Lochart said.

The Small Business Edition was also designed for businesses with fewer employers and simpler organizational hierarchies in mind.

"They're not looking to differentiate the rules and policies they put in place for different groups in users. That's in contrast to what we offer with the Enterprise Edition, where you've got employees subject to different rules and policies for their e-mail because they work in different countries or they work in different departments," Lochart said.

Rules and policies have been simplified for small businesses, he said.

As with the Enterprise Edition, the Small Business Edition is priced on a per user, per year basis, and it's sold on an annual subscription basis. It costs $25 per user, per year. The more users, the lower the cost, but the first price break doesn't take place until a customer has more than 250 users.

"My expectation is that most of our deals will be done at that $25 per user per year level," Lochart said.

Of course, Postini isn't selling all of these licenses on its own. The company has spent the last six months or so building out its indirect sales channel. Considering that most small businesses turn to value-added resellers for their IT needs, it makes sense to sell through a VAR channel, Lochart said.

"The resellers will be reselling both version of the service, but what we expect is that the Small Business Edition will primarily be sold by our indirect partners," Lochart said.