Headquarters: Gulf Breeze, Fla.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: SecureTide spam and virus protection

Year Founded: 2002

Number of Channel Partners: 1,300 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Managed Service Provider

Why You Should Care: AppRiver offers a full portfolio of cloud-based e-mail security services as well as a hosted version of Microsoft Exchange 2007, and it lets solution providers slap their own names on the services via a new white-label program.

The Lowdown: If you said AppRiver has its head in the clouds, the company just might take that as a compliment.

The Gulf Breeze, Fla.-based company specializes in hosted e-mail services, putting it and its channel partners in prime position to cash in on all of the buzz currently surrounding cloud computing.

"Everything we do is in the cloud," said Scott Cutler, executive vice president of AppRiver. "Customers need messaging infrastructure in place, but they don't need it in-house. What they really want is a reliable [system] with state-of-the art everything at a fixed fee."

Cutler says the company boasts a 95 percent customer retention rate for its hosted services, which include e-mail protection, encryption, e-mail archiving, spam filtering, Web filtering and malware protection. The company also offers hosted Microsoft Exchange 2007.

While its customers range in size from small guys with 10 employees up to enterprises with 25,000 employees, AppRiver's sweet spot is in the midmarket, Cutler says.

The company now offers a white-label option that enables solution providers to put their own brand on the services they resell, says Brian Haynes, channel director at AppRiver.

"Channel partners like our services because they're easy," Haynes says. "It takes 30 minutes to get provisioned for a new service. It's not something you have to sit with and configure with lots of handholding."

Adds Cutler: "We've taken the risk away from getting a sophisticated application."