July 9th, 2007
Google's $625 million security splash
Google has announced its second acquisition in the computer security space, shelling out a whopping $625 million in cash to snap up enterprise e-mail security vendor Postini.
The deal, which follows May’s purchase of GreenBorder Technologies, confirms Google’s big push into a lucrative security compliance marketplace and gives the search marketing giant its own technology to harden the Google Apps suite.
Like Google Apps, Postini’s services are entirely hosted, eliminating the need to install any hardware or software. A leader in its field, Postini serves more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users, and was one of our first partners for Google Apps. Their email and IM management services include inbound and outbound policy management, spam and virus protection, content filtering, message archiving, encryption, and more. We will continue to support Postini’s customers and we look forward to the possibilities ahead.
Postini serves more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users and was one of Google’s first enterprise partners for Google Apps.
The company’s bread and butter is technology that strips junk mail from e-mail servers but a big part of Postini’s offerings is a suite of e-mail system administration applications for compliance and security.
Founded in 1999 by Scott Petry, Postini received venture capital funding from August Capital, Mobius Venture Capital, and Sun Microsystems.
Postini was recently making moves to position itself for an IPO but the price tag of this Google deal gives the company a solid exit.
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of the third quarter 2007.
Ryan Naraine is a journalist and security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab. He manages Threatpost.com, a security news portal. Here is Ryan's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
For daily updates on Ryan's activities, follow him on Twitter.
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