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."

Comments

Postini's been around a while

[winkydink]

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.

Re:OT but yikes

[jshriverWVU]

Especially when they have their own wonderful top of the line spam filters. The first year I used gmail I never received a single spam. Then I started using my email more publically and after a couple years I might get 2-3 a day but they end up in my spam folder. In the past couple years I can say probably less than 20 spam emails have made it into my inbox. So not sure why they would want to buy this, unless it was to keep competition low. While I like google, and hope this isn't the case, I dont see any other reason.

Re:Coming soon: Google Airlines

[iago-vL]

I believe you mean "strap on the googles".

We use Postini and it is GOOD.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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.

Re:OT but yikes

[SatanicPuppy]

Well they're 8 years old and they passed 10 million users and a billion messages a day last year, so they're a bit more than a startup.

I had my previous firm using Postini

[ashitaka]

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.