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Google to Acquire Postini
Dynamoo writes "Google has announced that it is to acquire Postini, company best known for its corporate spam filtering and security service, but also active in Instant Messaging and compliance area.
The deal is to purchase Postini for $625m in cash. The acquisition is slated to enhance Google's application portfolio, and Google will also acquire several very large Blue Chip customers that have previously eluded it."
I'm really surprised that Google has decided to buy out a male stripper. Male thongs have been losing value by the day lately.
Then again.. It's Google. They must be up to something.
If Postini is not an Italian company, then that is the gayest name ever.
No lines, no waiting, free food and drinks, but the windows are replaced with screens showing advertisements 100% of the time.
There is some additional commentary on the deal on Centernetworks.
Mark me as OT, but damn. I really wish I could make a startup and sell it to google for $1million let alone the $500M+ these smaller companies seem to be getting.
Postini is not a word that's easily googleized. Best I can come up with is Googlini.
Google will acquire Postini for $625 million in cash
Mr. Postini: You have the briefcase, Page?
Brin pulls an uzi from under his jacket.
Page: Just sign the papers, Postini.
The institution I work has been using Postini for almost a year now. It works pretty well. But, I've also used DSPAM and Spamassassin, and Postini is definitely not $625M better than either of those two.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
They have a large customer base and I am told that they were preparing to go public. So this isn't 2 guys in a garage, more like 300 people or so.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Googling "google buys" provides a pretty rich and varied list of Google's acquisitions: YouTube, Grand Central, Feedburner, Measure Map... and on and on and on. There's even rumours in some parts that a tie up between Google and Apple might be on the cards. Sorry, but it's getting to the point where "Google buys" stories just aren't informative anymore.
I wonder if big companies awash with cash wouldn't be better off doing stuff themselves instead of paying ridiculous premiums. The other interesting thing is how profitable this company is and if google would've earned more buying 625 million $ of government bonds than whatever they'll make during the next few years of this.
But this isn't always the case, I remember reading "you idiots" comments after news ltd bought myspace for 300(?) million and then reading a few months later how google was paying 800(?) million for their search box and other stuff to go on myspace, that was truly mind-boggling.
It's like they feel the need to spend cash if it makes sense or not sometimes.
Does "in cash" really mean what I think it means? (Posting as AC, as I am too embarassed to admit I don't get this language as much as I thought I did)
"The acquisition is slated to enhance Google's application portfolio,"
... hope they do not become another Jotspot and vanish into thin air.
We've been using Postini for the past few years, and have had great results with it. I just hope the Google interface design team does some work with Postini. Not that the Postini interface is horrible, but it could use more of the polish that Google brings to their apps.
chown -R us.
It is hoped that the speed of the jet ski will help it jump the shark really well.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Always buying companies instead of innovating.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It is Google. Nevermind. This is the greatest news of the week! Yea, Google!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Yes, they say they aren't but let's consider the list of the ever-growing stuff they control.
*Website Index that they will restrict depending on your border.
*Email, both Gmail and now filtering (which if they have postini can strip marketing data)
*Image search that is also filtered by
*Metrics and marketing data available to anyone with a search warrant.
Actually Postini probably are worth that amount, easily. They own extensive IP and have a lot more than just spam filtering in their portfolio. They have also been profitable for the last few years, something which their competitors can't claim, most of which operate in the red continually. They are just about the biggest mail filtering company in the world and google were about to impliment them on all their mail services anyway. By all accounts Microsoft were sniffing round them a couple of years ago but the owners told them to get stuffed, so MS just went and bought a smaller competitor.
We use Postini here and it's really really good. It reliably filters out nearly all the spam that arrives, and it's fairly inexpensive ($1 per mailbox per month). Scaling it to the size of Google will make it even better. I'm looking forward to it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Recycling 70s sci-fi ideas and plastering Google on them does not make for an interesting, informative or funny post.
Please try harder.
Cash - so a suitcase of dollar/euro/pound notes then?
Get your own free personal location tracker
...is a way to *easily* download copies of your emails from your gmail inbox onto your local hard drive, and do it from the web interface with simple point and click. Their POP interface doesn't count.
Postini was bought for an amount roughly 83 times the price AMD paid of Transmeta. That just completely screws with my perceptions of scale regarding the value of companies. And I thought I had a pretty good idea of the number system we use.
Maybe these companies should just start publishing these numbers in milliards and crores and I would still grasp the value of the transaction about as well...
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
It's most likely another step towards Google creating their own OS, where all machines are thin-clients and applications are run from a server such as the way Google Apps are at the moment.
From the article: Like Google Apps, Postini's services are entirely hosted, eliminating the need to install any hardware or software.
Personally I wouldn't go for it, but it makes sound economic sense to a lot of companies. Thin clients are alot cheaper than standard PC's and instead of paying thousands of euro to microsoft for licensing, they can pay a small subscription to Google instead. Maybe they will receive the service free from Google, with Google making money from advertising within it's OS.
Sir, just mind your own business please. Carry on.
This will be greeted with cheers by countless Exchange-Server-In-A-Box admins, who can't configure any sort of spam or content filtering on their side, or by those too frightened by Unix to implement their own relays. "If it has Google goodness, it must be ok - lets just use Postini! (while I make myself less and less relevant)".
Sorry, bitter today, mopped up after too many bad mail admins.
PS Find the joke and win the prize!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Oh the irony! My company's email service is hosted by Postini and is down this morning.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
I started off with Spamassassin+CLAMAV and something else and some Exchange server-based rules but the upkeep was time-intensive and the spam were still coming down our wire.
Then I got Postini and the world changed. Upkeep was mindless, the product was really cheap per mailbox and a huge portion of the spam was stopped at Postini's servers hugely reducing the load on our Spamwall and Exchange servers. In addition, it also gave us mail spooling for when we had to take the Exchange server down or if our Internet connection went out. Nothing was ever lost.
This is another case of Google finding an excellent product that fits in with their business direction and will enhance their products, not just a Microsoft-type acquisition intended to stifle competition.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
It also informs the Chinese government of the exact location of those who search for forbidden terms/subjects or put them on blogs- then it provides options on how to best allocate resources to "plug the leak".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I would lean towards saying that Microsoft might be better positioned to do that kind of reality, because they have better relationships with all of the hardware vendors. I could see them building something into Windows that has a standard way of obtaining .x files from attached devices on the network, indicating various repair states and problems, and Microsoft would then work with other hardware vendors to come up with a closed spec for making the goggles and wireless actually work.
This is my sig.
The ACM redirects all of my personal email through Postini to my Yahoo account, and it's been a great service. Catches all kinds of garbage that Yahoo is incapable of filtering. But the idea of all of my personal mail now going through "do no evil" Google is really disquieting. I evaded gmail, but it's apparently found me.
A blog entry over at the BackChanne breaks down just how many customers Postini had in the enterprise market, the only surprise for me was that Microsoft chose to take-out Frontbridge and not Postini. Whats next? Yahoo buys Messagelabs for 300M? Half the market share of Postini.
For those of you with click fatigue, the market rankings look like this:
Postini 49%
Messagelabs 22%
Frontbridge 21%
MXlogic 5%
Blackspider 0.4%
Nick
It makes a lot of sense. It says... "Hey, if we cant convert you to gmail or google apps for your domain" we can proxy your mail, append targeted ads, and you're not complaining because the spam protection, and the rest of the Postini services are free. Good for consumers, good for Google (more eyeballs, more money, less SysAdmin headaches). I think this is much more strategic to their overall business model than some of their other acquisitions.
If I had to guess why it's worth $millions, I'd say it's because of Google Apps for the Enterprise.
... I typed the above on speculation before reading the linked article. Turns out my hunches are dead-on.
Imagine you're wanting to make a service offering to host corporate America's email, which includes all of the private juicy tidbits of data that are in it as well. It makes a lot more sense, from the corporate entity's standpoint to have that interaction be with one outsourced company, not two like it is today (READ: Gmail for your domain currently uses Postini for anti-SPAM). Add onto that the compliance aspects of outsourced email (think: lawyers needing copies of email for lawsuits), which Postini is selling as an add-on feature for Enterprise Gmail, and you can see why they might want to tap that datastream for an administrator's "google for everyone's email with search terms X" for some lawsuit.
Apologies
-Tim
libertarian: (n) socially liberal, financially conservative; neither left, nor right.
My apologies if you couldn't care less.
...You're just somebody's employee, not a financial analyst.
Actually, Google would be well placed to do this -- at least from a test standpoint. They (working with Earthlink) are looking to provide wireless to all of San Francisco. Once that infrastructure is in place, they have a full network that can do geospatially based maps, ads, etc. Imagine walking around San Francisco wearing the Google Googgles (TM) - information pops up based on which building you look at (they've already done the street level mapping) - including businesses that are located there. Or if you are walking (or driving) and pre-program in a map to display with arrows and the like.. I'm certain others will add to this...
I don't doubt that some of the spam filtering procedure developed by Postini will eventually help filter Gmail. Indeed, it wouldn't make sense in the long run for Google to keep two separate spam filtering platforms. But here's the point: the primary beneficiary of the buyout will be the Postini spam filter itself, the thing that will be sold for subscription fees to enterprises. That product will improve for one simple reason: Access to the incredible amount of data that Google has access to. We all help Google when we're kind enough to press the "mark as spam" button in Gmail. And I'm sure they remember, and our entry sharpens up whatever Bayesian algorithm Google uses to detect future spam. When Google's data merges with Postini's data, it will be very hard for other enterprise spam filtering providers to offer a product of similar effectiveness. To do so, they would need to store their own databases on a scale large enough to compete with Google - which isn't cheap. It is cheap for Google to supply Postini filters with raw data, since Google collect that data anyway. So Postini the pay service gets an incredible competitive advantage though it's intergration with the Googlebrain. That's not to mention the extra mindshare that the Google brand brings with it.
For those of us who wondered how Google plans to profit from all this investment in a free email service, this is a part of the answer: There will be a for-pay enterprise version based on the same investment. The same goes for Search, btw. So pay attention: this is Google trying to become something more than an ad pusher. And it's not a dumb idea: the marginal cost for Google to develop a good for-pay spam filtering system is small compared to the money they could sell it for.
And since you can already buy Google computers to search your enterprise for internal data, and those Google computers are heavily based on work Google developed for other goals (and for free access), we might ask the following question: What other things is Google good at, and would enterprises be interested in paying for products based on those skills? Google maps? For sure! But consider Google News, the human-free, smart organizer of articles by subject, relevance and prominence. Are there companies with a lot of data that could benefit from the sort of organization alorithms that run Google News? Damn right! Each year more enterprises are finding that the cheapness of data storage left them with attics of archival data that's a complete mess. I think we're starting to understand the "???" that separated Google's free services and Profit.
Considering they are hitting the plateau for hiring extreme/smart developers (nope, I guess I didn't "cut it" after interview #3), and learning more about ads/spam and spam filtering, this is a good buy to compliment the double click purchase.
But for 625M!? Makes me think not...
Your insight is only 15 years late.
How about you read a book sometime, ignoramus?
Steve Mann beat you by 6 years, but you don't care. You'll continue to spout banality as if it were novel, oblivious to reality.
When Postine doesn't need to store for compliace reasons the whole email filtering process never hits a disk - it stays in memory all the way through.
,Google Zurich HQ aren't that far removed from Postini's offices so that is at leats not too much effort :-)
That's also why the average time between receipt of mail by Postini and your incoming server receiving the header is in the region of 400ms or so, as opposed to, say Messagelabs which is (if I recall correctly) somewhere between 2 and 4 minutes.
Postini is also the only one who also has a Swiss hosted setup, and it's thus the only one who can filter for Swiss banks.. Control of the lot is done from Zurich (it has to be legally limited to originating from a Swiss location only).
I hope Google keeps it the way it's going, I like the company. And if I recall correctly
Insert
Google keeps making these multi million dollar purchases. I hope they're using a credit card to earn miles.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
A revolt is sweeping the intergoogle as googledotters dismay at googlesofts purchase of diggoogle.
I just thought maybe I should sell the idea to MS - change from using a rectangular screen to a rounded one and reduce the stress!
if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
... for the same amount
realkiwi