Spam Growth Fuels Antispam Market

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