Cisco security partners become competitors

Cisco's recent acquisition of e-mail security firm IronPort for US$830 million has pushed the networking giant into direct competition with MessageLabs as well as traditional antivirus vendors such as Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro.

The technology acquired allows Cisco's hardware to better deal with threats from e-mail and Instant Messenger applications, but pits it against its security partners.

James Scollay, vice president of MessageLabs Asia Pacific, said most enterprises will have to choose between dealing with spam and other e-mail-based threats internally or farming out the responsibility to a managed services provider.

Scollay argued that administrators are better off with a managed service because most of the junk is removed before it reaches the internal network and unpredictable spikes in spam volumes are avoided.

"The average spam rate is about 73 percent globally. If you use MessageLabs then you never see 73 percent of your e-mail -- it will never enter your system," Scollay told ZDNet Australia in a telephone interview on Monday.

"With an IronPort or whatever, you still have to get that 73 percent into your infrastructure using bandwidth that you are paying for. Then you have to have the hardware to deal with it.

"If -- as did happen last year -- spam volumes go up by over 100 percent in a very short space of time, you are the one that has to react and respond to that. Cisco isn't going to come running up with a whole lot of new boxes, you are going to have to buy them. With Messagelabs it is our problem. We will have to deal with that."

According to analyst firm Gartner, the IronPort acquisition also puts Cisco head to head with the big antivirus vendors. In a report published last Friday, research director Peter Firstbrook said: "This acquisition ... will place Cisco in direct competition with its traditional partners McAfee, Microsoft, Symantec and Trend Micro".

In a research note titled IronPort Buy Will Make Cisco a Major E-Mail Security Player Canada-based Firstbrook believes Cisco's move means smaller companies now have virtually no chance of breaking into the lucrative enterprise e-mail security market.

"The consolidation in the e-mail security market is now almost complete. Other vendors will find it difficult to compete with industry leaders Cisco, Microsoft and Symantec in the enterprise market.

"Gartner believes the two remaining service providers, MessageLabs and Postini, will likely be acquired by telecom providers in their respective markets," added Firstbrook.

Co-opetition?
Cisco's move into the e-mail security market is unlikely to stop the company working with its new competitors on other technologies, according to Gartner.

"Gartner does not ... expect these conflicts to present significant barriers to cooperation with Cisco in other areas, such as network access control," said Firstbrook.

This view was backed up by McAfee's marketing director in APAC, Allan Bell, who told ZDNet Australia: "Ironport isn't a McAfee competitor but McAfee has a close relationship with Cisco and together they are working on network access control".

A Symantec spokesperson agreed that e-mail is only a small part of the security landscape.

"E-mail security at the gateway is just one piece of an ever-expanding puzzle. Customers require messaging security and management for e-mail as well as instant messaging, from scanning and filtering to archiving and recovery across their heterogeneous networks," the spokesperson said.