Clearswift Updates Enterprise Filtering Suite

The product, dubbed EnterpriseSuite, contains three components: ClearPoint Policy Management Infrastructure (PMI) 6.0, a management infrastructure that can handle either worldwide or regional policies; the new ClearSecure, an encryption engine; and ClearEdge 4.9, a boundary SMTP filter.

The technology is slated to ship by the end of November, said Paul Rutherford, chief marketing officer of Clearswift, which has corporate headquarters in Reading, England, with a U.S. base in Waltham.

Pricing for the suite will vary depending on the number of users and branch locations supported, but Rutherford estimated that an entry-level solution would start at $150,000. The vendor has a pending deal covering 170,000 users that could carry a price tag of $1.9 million, he said.

Mike McKinzie, president of Secur-tek, a year-old security solution provider in Irvine, Calif., that sells Clearswift products, welcomed the enterprise filtering policy management technology and said it would offer him add-on sales opportunities with existing customers.

"It's needed, and that's where the trend is going around e-mail. A lot of customers are looking to manage things from a real regional or global perspective," McKinzie said. "This lets me do it in a profound manner."

One key feature of ClearPoint PMI is its ability to apply different policies to servers on the same global network to accommodate policies that differ from country to country, said Rutherford.

Clearswift is already working on EnterpriseSuite deals with four different large systems integrators, although it plans to recruit smaller partners for the technology, Rutherford said. He cautioned, however, that the sales cycle for this product will be longer than for the company's MIMEsweeper technology, which most existing Clearswift resellers currently sell.

Among the arguments solution providers can use in making the case for EnterpriseSuite are its ability to help corporate customers meet privacy legislation requirements, reduce legal liability, protect their intellectual assets and reduce their storage costs, said Rutherford.

In the future, Clearswift plans to add support for instant messaging to its management suite.

"Our priority has been to increase the use of MIMEsweeper," said Rutherford. "The second order of business was to provide enterprise management information. The third is reassurance, education and recruitment of channel partners, and the fourth is now looking at new protocols, of which instant messaging is on the top of the list."

Clearswift has also created an Active antispam service for accounts that have opted for the maintenance contract associated with its ClearEdge module. Like an antivirus update service, Active updates a company's spam filters based on actual traffic patterns from several seed accounts. The technology supports integration with Symantec antivirus products.