A pair of veteran security vendors will use Interop as a stage for announcing new and upgraded products designed to keep corporate messaging systems protected from a variety of threats.

Following its February purchase of MailFrontier, SonicWall on Tuesday plans to announce the first release of MailFrontier's e-mail security gateway software and appliances under the SonicWall name. SonicWall plans to expand MailFrontier's target market of midsize companies to include small- and midsize businesses (SMB), says Gleb Budman, SonicWall's director of product management for e-mail security.

The SonicWall Email Security offerings protect against e-mail threats and include auditing, policy management and regulatory compliance features, Budman says.

Slated for release later this month, the SonicWall SMB Series Email Security appliances will include additional monitoring features and a new audit function that reports to administrators what happens to a message once it is received, Budman says. These appliances are aimed at companies with 50 to 1,000 users and will start at $1,395.

The SonicWall Enterprise Series Email Security appliances, designed for companies with 1,000 to 5,000 users, are set to be released next month, priced starting at $16,000. They will include the same monitoring and auditing upgrades as the SMB version and are based on a more robust hardware platform than their lower-end counterparts.

SonicWall Email Security 4.6 gateway software is available now, priced at $995 for as many as 50 users and $22,995 for 5,000 or more users.

With its MailFrontier acquisition, SonicWall is entering the crowded e-mail security arena where companies are struggling to distinguish themselves. SonicWall hopes a robust feature set and simplified administration will help it stand out, Budman says.

Ease of use is what sold Brian Marko, server operations engineer at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, to choose MailFrontier's e-mail security appliance last summer. Marko also tested appliances from Barracuda, IronPort and Symantec. "As far as ease of implementation and use, the other three didn't seem nearly as easy," says Marko, who manages about 2,000 in-boxes.

He said he's concerned when a vendor is acquired but hasn't noted any changes in support or the quality of updates for the appliance since the SonicWall acquisition.