Espion Finds Smarter Way To Fight Spam

Company:

Headquarters: Baton Rouge, La.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: Interceptor

Year Founded: 2003

Number of Channel Partners: 20 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Small business-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Espion International touts an artificial intelligence engine that "learns" e-mail content to determine if its spam.

The Lowdown: Espion International focuses on one of the most common, but often overlooked, security threat vectors -- e-mail.

Espion's flagship product, Interceptor, provides comprehensive e-mail security that includes antispam, antivirus, content management and a full encryption module on its appliance model.

However, what sets the company apart is a proactive artificial intelligence engine, the "brain of the system" executives said -- which scrutinizes the content of each e-mail message to determine whether or not to designate it as spam.

"We can differentiate what is spam for you and what is not spam for you because of what you use every day," said Murali Chakravarthi, Espion's CTO. "The system profiles the way you use your e-mail and uses that as a base to find out what the daily transactions are. It uses that to figure out what spam is."

Until recently, Espion's Interceptor appliance has best accommodated enterprise customers, or large organizations with stringent regulatory compliance mandates requiring e-mail to be HIPAA-certified or encrypted before being sent. However, over the past month Espion released Interceptor as a hosted service, which can easily scale down to SMB markets that need to meet those same requirements, executives said.

"That really opens us up from anyone in enterprise to mom-and-pop shops with two or three e-mail accounts," said Shane Toncrey, Espion's chief sales engineer.

For channel partners, the hosted model provides an opportunity to manage a wide range of customer accounts remotely, while retaining the benefit of a recurring revenue stream, Toncrey said, adding that the company planned on recruiting anywhere from 50 to 100 new channel partners in the next 12 months.

Partners can purchase their own hardware, and Espion will install their Interceptor software on it so the partners can run it out of their own data center. The SaaS model, which houses multiple functionalities, can also scale up and out as the end user's business grows, Toncrey said.

"It allows the product to grow as the company grows," Chakravarthi said.