July 14, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY
REVIEW) -- Spam filters allow hosting firms to offer their customers
sophisticated protection against unsolicited, junk email. Protection
has become increasingly important as studies reveal the profound effect
spam has on corporate productivity.
According to a recent estimate by Ferris Research (ferris.com), a consultancy focused on messaging and collaboration, spam cost American corporations more than $10 billion in 2003.
"Spam-related costs are increasing
rapidly for both corporations and ISPs, mainly as a result of lost
productivity, consumption of IT resources and help desk support," said
David Ferris, president of Ferris Research, in a statement. "Based on
interviews of corporate messaging managers, it is clear that spam is a
major problem for corporate IT departments. We estimate the total costs
for spam in corporations were $8.9 billion in 2002, and increased to
$14 per user per month in 2003."
Corporate users report that they expect
the number of messages, as well as the average size of each message, to
increase substantially, leading to even higher costs. Statistics are
demonstrating exponential growth in the amount of spam transmitted.
In early 2003, it was estimated that spam
accounted for 15 to 20 percent of all inbound email at corporations and
30 percent of inbound email at service providers. Today, it is
estimated that over 60 percent of all email messages are spam.
In mid-2003, an average of approximately
10 spam messages per day were sent to North American business users and
approximately 12 spam messages per day were sent to ISP users.
By 2008 that figure will increase to over
40 spam messages per day for business users, and 54 spam messages per
day for ISP users. For five percent of business users, the increase
will be more dramatic - they will receive between 130 and 400 spam
messages per day by 2008.
Due to the lost productivity and concern
about corporate liability over adult-related solicitations, the market
for antispam services will climb to over $1 billion by 2008 from a
little over $120 million in 2003.
"Previous sales of antispam services were
tiny, but as the demand for antispam products and services is
increasing, antispam vendors have started to turn a profit," said
Ferris. "There's clearly an arms race between spammers and antispam
companies - it's a very dynamic environment. For corporate users, we
expect the companies that offer gateway solutions, rather than desktop
solutions, to be the most successful."
Gateway solutions will be more successful
because they are marketed primarily to service providers, who implement
them on the behest of large enterprise, to filter and eliminate spam
before it even reaches the recipient's mailbox, as in the case of
Brightmail Antispam 6.0. The application employs a mixture of
technologies, a huge spam detection network and a real-time rule
delivery mechanism that creates a proactive heuristic that actually
learns how spam evolves.
Brightmail's application also uses
dynamic lists of open proxy servers to identify and lock out known spam
senders. The latest version of the application also includes new
intelligent filters that work to identify foreign language spam. The
application is popular with service providers because it is immediately
effective out of the box and requires no administration. It is now used
by many ISPs, Web hosts and enterprises to cumulatively filter over 300
million mail accounts and delivers an accuracy rate that usually
exceeds 90 percent. Some providers offer the Brightmail service to
customers for an additional fee.
The self-maintaining Brightmail software's popularity led to Symantec (symantec.com),
a leader in IT security solutions, acquiring it last month to add to
its burgeoning portfolio of products. The acquisition positions
Symantec to take advantage of the growing antispam marketplace.
Ferris Research has estimated that global
business antispam seat deployment will increase from 11 million in
mid-2003 to over 500 million seats in 2008, with revenues from antispam
services topping $1 billion. Corporate antispam services will total
about $55 million in 2003 and over $850 million in 2008. At the same
time, the global ISP antispam seat deployment will increase from about
175 million in mid-2003 to nearly 1.2 billion seats in 2008. In terms
of revenues, this translates to $66 million in 2003 and over $200
million in 2008, making the marketplace an appealing business
proposition to vendors.
