According to the peanut gallery here, I have a strong resemblance to John Edwards. 

You decide:

Must be the hair…

Apologies everyone for no post activity today.  Had my hands full with a series of meetings so trying to get this one in under the wire.  Will make up for lost time tomorrow.

There are lots of folks in the broader on-line world that publish opinion, analysis, and ramblings on a daily basis. As someone with a short attention span and in need of meaningful information, I seek out folks that provide information relevant to my needs or interests in a consistent, informed, and compelling way.  There are no barriers to entry for setting up a blog minus some basic understanding of grammar, so how do you pick the value voices above the noise? 

One such voice is that of Paul Kedrosky and his blog "Infectious Greed."  I’m not sure how I even found him to begin with, but he is an informed commentator on capital markets, venture capital, and start-ups among many other things. I decided to let him know I was a fan via an unsolicited email and he sent me a very nice response.  That is cool.  I more than anyone else know that email is an increasingly ineffective tool for communication, but wanted to let Paul know I enjoyed his writing and email was the best way to do that.

Thanks Paul for getting back to me (although you didn’t need to) and thanks for your continued insight on things that are important to me.

Bradley Young who leads our services team here at MessageGate has started a blog – Random Desiderata.  He gets points for creative titles and I am looking forward to reading his posts.  In his role, Bradley oversees our activity profiles where we audit and analyze corporate email traffic as well as supports our customers as they continue to apply our technology in new and meaningful ways. 

Another "milestone" for baseball as Barry Bonds ties Hank Aaron’s home run tally of 755.  My status as a fan was impacted more by the strike in 1994 and subsequent cancellation of the World Series than by anything else (even WWII didn’t cancel the World Series).  I still love to go to a ballgame (even with $9 beers) and believe that the passion of baseball is best seen at the minor league level as this is where guys are still playing their hearts out.  I don’t have enough information to know if Bonds is a steroid junkie.  If it is all natural, I look forward to my own athletic peak in my early 40s.  Here’s an eye opening comparison of Bonds and McGwire over the years by looking at their baseball cards and has the catchy title of "Mac or Bonds: Who Roided It Up Better?"

Not sure why they picked me, but Reply to All was their featured blog today.  Thanks!

Just about 2 years ago to the day (7/20 to be exact), Microsoft announced its acquisition of Frontbridge touting that "Fully managed services will help ensure e-mail compliance and continuity while providing customers with additional security protection from spam and virus threats."  Fast forward two years and Google acquires Postini to help enterprises "support complex business rules, information security mandates, and an array of legal and corporate compliance issues."

Frontbridge is now part of the Forefront set of services (along with Sybari and a few other acquisitions) covering the client, server, and edge.

So who is chasing whom here?

News of this acquisition is not really a major surprise as Google had been utilizing Postini’s hosted anti-spam solution for some time as part of their Gmail offering.  Postini built a great business over the years and was contemplating an IPO.  Here’s a good deal summary from alarm:clock and one from Ryan McIntyre of Postini investor Mobius Venture Capital.  Even Fred Wilson has his wish list of new features (note how they all deal with managing the queue of filtered inbound email as you read below).

What is a bit of a surprise is the rationale and positioning around the deal.  Here is what Dave Girouard, head of the Enterprise business, had to say:

"Larger enterprises, however, face a challenge: though they want to deliver simple, useful hosted applications to their employees, they’re also required to support complex business rules, information security mandates, and an array of legal and corporate compliance issues. In effect, many businesses use legacy systems not because they are the best for their users, but because they are able to support complex business rules. This isn’t a tradeoff that any business should have to make."

"Business rules, information security mandates, and compliance issues" are a whole different world than search, adwords, and ad revenue business models.  Google is certainly a force to be reckoned with and with their enterprise business being only 2% or so of their total business they have growth on the mind.  Dave goes on:

"We realized that we needed a more complete way to address these information security and compliance issues in order to better support the enterprise community."

Postini provides a great hosted anti-spam/anti-virus service.  Turn it on and bad stuff stops arriving in your inbox.  However, larger enterprises are reluctant to trust their outbound messaging stream and, in many cases, their archiving to hosted solutions.  Zantaz, a hosted provider and recently acquired by Autonomy, acquired EAS some time ago in order to have a deployable software in addition to their hosted service.  Will the enterprise embrace Google for information security and compliance?  If at all, I would say more probable for the small/mid-market than larger enterprises but time will tell.

We have examined hosted/SaaS offerings in the past and find pretty consistent feedback that there is comfort on the inbound side with trusting a 3rd party service to filter mail, but reluctance on the outbound side, technical/behind the firewall challenges associated with doing it for internal mail, and varying levels of concern about hosting email archiving.  Again, smaller companies may have a different take but this represents the enterprise mindset from my perspective.  Here’s some additional thoughts on it from Roger Matus who runs another company in this space.

Updated:

Michael Osterman does a good job of touching on the privacy and security dimensions of the deal.

nuBridges, Inc. (www.nubridges.com) is looking for two product managers – a strong director-level role and senior product manager both with security backgrounds.  They are Atlanta based so odds are you will need to be.  I was fortunate enough to be part of the founding team there in 2001 and they have been on a tear since.  If you are interested, send a resume to the VP of Product Management, Gary Palgon (gpalgon at nubridges dot com).