Microsoft to acquire FrontBridge for e-mail security

Microsoft Wednesday announced its intent to acquire FrontBridge Technologies, a provider of online service for securing and archiving e-mail.

Microsoft plans to continue running the company and offering a service to provide corporate users with archiving features targeted at e-mail disaster recovery and compliance, spam and virus protection.

Terms of the deal were not announced, but Microsoft said all of the 160 employees of FrontBridge, which is headquartered in Marina Del Rey, Calif., would stay on with Microsoft.

“It’s a good move for Microsoft,” said Matt Cain, an analyst with Gartner. “It highlights the increasing [corporate] demand for e-mail hygiene services and the growing demand for this delivery model.”

The deal comes almost five months after Microsoft acquired Sybari Software and its anti-virus and anti-spam products. Cain says Microsoft now has two of the three methods for delivering e-mail hygiene: hosted (FrontBridge), premise (Sybari) and an appliance.

Postini and Message Labs are the other two major providers offering e-mail security as a service over the Internet.

“Customers really have a complete choice,” says Kim Akers, general manager of marketing in the Exchange Server Product Group. “Depending on their business requirements and where they want to invest their IT resources, they can choose to deploy a Microsoft or third-party solution they run on premise or choose to have an offering in the cloud as a service.”

Microsoft said the message compliance service includes archiving, retrieval and reporting services for e-mail and instant messages. The security portion of the service will use multi-layered filtering technology and encryption, and a message continuity service will offer high availability and redundancy through the eight worldwide data centers that have been the foundation of the FrontBridge service.

FrontBridge has used that architecture to guarantee users 99.999% uptime, and company officials say their network has been up 100% since the company began in 1999.

Today, FrontBridge markets its service through OEMs such as Sprint and AT&T, which re-brand the service with their own name, and value-added resellers who typically sell it under the FrontBridge name. The company has some 3,000 customers including Bausch & Lomb, Reebok, Georgia-Pacific, and Kyocera.

Microsoft said it plans to continue support for all of the e-mail platforms currently covered by FrontBridge, including main rival Lotus Notes/Domino.

“We are very excited about what this means,” says Dave Cohen, vice president and co-founder of FrontBridge. “We feel we have great people, a great service and partner model, and a great technology. This pairs us with a company that we feel has a shared vision in this marketplace so we are very excited about giving the customers more options and capabilities.”