SecurityReview

Proofpoint
Price: By module per year; e.g., $20,000 for 1,000 users for antispam, antivirus and content compliance.

Proofpoint's entry into the on-demand services arena comes as the email security market is beginning to sort itself out.

Its two chief email appliance competitors, CipherTrust and IronPort, have been gobbled up by Secure Computing and Cisco, respectively.

Meanwhile, there's a growing appetite for on-demand services, as many companies want to offload management overhead and, large enterprises in particular, insist on retaining control over policy creation and enforcement. Proofpoint dives into a market that includes MessageLabs, Postini (recently acquired by Google) and Microsoft.

"About 15 to 20 percent of the market is outsourced," says Andres Kohn, VP of product management. "We expect that to grow to 30 to 40 percent. A lot of that is predicated on how spammers behave and how much pain they inflict--especially if they have ramp-ups like last fall."

Proofpoint is aiming at the higher end of market, where it says its flexibility and scalability is compatible with corporate philosophy.

"We think you'll see large corporate adoption speed up," says Paul LaPorte, global solutions marketing manager. "We align with the way they do business. "

On Demand can be purchased as pure "in the cloud" services, or as a hybrid, in which inbound protection is provided as a service, while outbound protection--encryption and data loss prevention--are delivered by on-site appliances, software or virtual appliances.

--NEIL ROITER