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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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.