Gartner: Don't Wait For The Anti-Spam Shakeout

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March 17, 2004 (11:54 AM EST)

Gartner: Don't Wait For The Anti-Spam Shakeout

The current glut of anti-spam vendors is about to end, analysts at Gartner said Wednesday. But enterprises shouldn't stay on the sidelines until the shakeout is over.

By the end of the year, Gartner predicted, the current roster of about 40 vendors in the enterprise anti-spam filtering market will shrink to fewer than 10. As consolidation accelerates and as anti-spam technology continues to rapidly change, most of today's vendors will be "left by the wayside," said Maurene Caplan Grey, a research director with Gartner, and one of two analysts who authored a recently-released report on the state of the anti-spam market.

"We're going to see consolidation in the marketplace," Grey said, "with the vendors which remain those that have their own proprietary anti-spam filtering technology, or others who license those technologies to build a suite-style boundary-level e-mail security solution."

Among the companies that Gartner believes will be among the survivors of this shakeout in anti-spam, Grey cited vendors such as Brightmail, CipherTrust, and FrontBridge Technologies. Those most likely to be left behind, she said, are smaller vendors with a limited track record.

But predictions made today may be more or less moot tomorrow, she added, because anti-spam technology is a moving target. In fact, Gartner expects that this is the last anti-spam specific report that it will produce; by the time the next one comes onto the research firm's schedule, Gartner will have rolled spam defenses into a broader category of e-mail security.

Consolidation isn't unusual in a relatively new market such as anti-spam, said Grey, but there are other factors which play a part in the incredibly shrinking vendor list.

"There's a lot of 'low hanging fruit' still out there for smaller vendors," she said, but that window is quickly closing: unlike today, when only a minority of enterprises have defenses against spam, by the end of the year, a majority will have done so.

She likened the shift from many to a few in the anti-spam sector to what happened in the anti-virus market three years ago. Then, enterprises scrambled to protect their networks from hackers, but within a short time, a slew of anti-virus vendors became a much smaller pool.

But waiting for the dust to settle isn't a smart idea, said Grey. "While many enterprise spam filtering vendors will be gone or will refocus their technologies elsewhere by the end of this year, enterprises can't afford to delay decisions until the market shakes out," she said. "Their problems with spam have become too enormous."

Like other spam watchers, Gartner estimates that between 60 and 75 percent of all incoming e-mail is junk. And where once it was more of a nuisance, now spam is often the carrier of worms, or targets financial and confidential information through phishing expeditions, e-mail that poses as legitimate messages from major corporations.

Instead of sitting back to see which vendors remain, Grey recommended that enterprises look closely at today's providers, and pick a solution from a company which invests heavily in anti-spam R&D, and which also sees anti-spam as just one piece of the overall e-mail security picture.

"Look at the degree to which a vendor is spending R&D money," she urged. "Companies in this space must invest a larger percentage in research and development than technology vendors in other areas, simply to stay ahead of the spam curve."

And don't get hung up on feature sets, she recommended. "It's going to be a cut-throat year for anti-spam vendors," she said, and they know that. The best will react quickly to implement innovative features debuted by rivals. "If a vendor doesn't a feature today, it will have it tomorrow."

More important, said Grey, is that enterprises evaluate vendors on how well they understand that spam filtering is only a component in a much larger e-mail boundary security solution.

"E-mail is a commodity, so anti-spam is just a commodity on top of a commodity. Enterprises should look at the vendors they've short-listed and evaluate them on the degree to which the vendor understands the bigger picture of spam filtering," Grey concluded.