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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."
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.
You've got that wrong. They're acquiring a truly nasty coffee substitute made from burned wheat flour and molasses. Obviously, they're afraid of their geeks getting coffee nerves.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
"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.
Yeah, it has a better sound to it than some of the alternatives. Anybody wanna Poogle?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
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)
No, it doesn't mean that they'll show up with a suitcase (or truck) full of bills. It simply means that the purchase will happen with currency of some sort (likely bank transfers and such), rather than paying for it with Google stock (the value of which fluctuates--well, it fluctuates moreso than hard currency).
This guy's the limit!
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 doesn't mean cash as in coins or notes; a cheque or bank transfer is very easily converted to cash in comparison to paying with shares. Google bought YouTube for $1.65bn in shares for example.
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
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!
Cash - so a suitcase of dollar/euro/pound notes then?
Get your own free personal location tracker
At first, I was thinking it was some type of pasta.
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.
How about Postle? Usage:"I have a Postle running on my email account to filter out all my spam except for unobtrusive,targeted ones specifically catering to my internet usage".
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
I wish it was just nasty coffee. Google owning a company that handles things like email "information security" is like a wolf owning a Chicken Farm. So I guess that means the emails etc.. will be secure (provided you don't mind Google also taking a look as well).
So Google takes one more step along the road from "Do No Harm" to "1984 Big Brother"
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Sounds like a pokemon :/
Sir, just mind your own business please. Carry on.
Actually, enhanced reality is considerably more interesting than virtual reality.
Example: the copy machine is jammed. The goggles give you a kind of x-ray vision showing exactly where the jam is, and a line drawing superimposed on the copier animates the next step in removing the jam.
Example: Take the cell phone company idea of location based services, but instead of sticking it on the phone, overlay the information on the user's perception.
If you imagine a generalized service of this sort, Google is better positioned than anybody with its technological infrastructure. Not that I think that's what they are doing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Anybody wanna Poogle?
Maybe when I'm done with my Wii.
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.
The vessle with the Postle holds the brew that is true!
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 think it's what the Jawas yell it out several times in Star Wars. "Postini!"
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.
We truly are becoming The Borg. Just add in RFID implants, cell phones in our teeth, a laser range-finder/scanner, and an exoskeleton, and the transformation will be complete. It's all current or near-future tech.
By the way, I think this is called augmented reality .
I remember Postum fondly from my youth. No, I don't want a cup right now. Lets just keep it as a fond memory.
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
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.
Wouldn't a Postini-Google merger actually be... Postle? I know when I get enough spam, I sure as hell want to go postal.
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...
I'm hurt. An anomymous troll. Forget to take your medication today? Don't worry - just call upstairs for mommy and she'll bring it for you.
Actually, I enjoyed Snow Crash. I found Stephenson through Cryptonomicon, read the Baroque Cycle, and then went on to his smaller books because I enjoyed his writing so much.
Anyway, it wasn't Snow Crash I was thinking of, but I guess that's apt. As much as I enjoyed Stephenson, I was a trekkie for far longer, and the Borg are a much better-known analog.
Damn. I fed the troll.
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
No, it was not an ad hominen attack. You shouldn't throw around words you don't understand. A personal attack? I suppose, a mild one. OTOH, anonymous trolls deserve them, so...
There's an anime running now about pretty much exactly that, called dennou coil. Highly recommended viewing, imo.
- These characters were randomly selected.
As a friend of mine at work said, "Do no evil. My ass!"
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been wide
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