* Microsoft-FrontBridge part of bigger picture
Last week’s announcement by Microsoft that it plans to acquire FrontBridge Technologies marks another – and a major – push for Microsoft into the messaging security industry.
FrontBridge, one of the leading managed service providers, offers a wide range of hosted services, including anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, outbound content scanning, message archiving, e-mail encryption and other services. The company currently has about 3,100 customers around the world. The decision to acquire FrontBridge http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/072005-frontbridge.html follows Microsoft’s acquisitions of Sybari and Giant.
What does this acquisition mean for the messaging market? First and most clearly, it signals that Microsoft is taking security ever more seriously by acquiring some of the better vendors of messaging security capabilities. Instead of simply providing basic security functionality in its products and thereby leaving plenty of room for third parties to provide enhanced functionality as it has done in the past, Microsoft is going head-to-head with messaging security vendors by offering best-of-breed capabilities from leading and well-respected vendors using multiple delivery models – in-house and hosted.
The acquisition of FrontBridge also will help bolster the managed service model for messaging hygiene and related services. Many organizations are resistant to the notion of managed services. Microsoft’s entry into this market should help to spur growth in the managed services space by making the biggest software company a key provider of these services.
Perhaps more importantly, however, the acquisition of these messaging security vendors by Microsoft signals that security is now inseparable from basic messaging functionality. For example, no one buys a car that includes just basic airbags or a basic anti-lock braking system and then looks for a third-party provider of better capabilities to replace them. Instead, these systems are simply integrated into the vehicle and increasingly offered as standard equipment. Similarly, anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spyware and other capabilities are so critical to the proper operation of a messaging system today that they are getting subsumed into the messaging system itself. Microsoft’s continued acquisition of messaging security vendors (which I believe is certainly far from over) is fairly clear evidence of this continued integration.
Just like it is no longer possible to purchase a word processing application that does not include a spell checker (in the mid-1980s it was possible to do so), it will one day be difficult or impossible to purchase a messaging server that does not also include sophisticated messaging security capabilities baked right in.
