SonicWall Lassoes A New Partner: MailFrontier

Palo Alto, Calif.-based MailFrontier makes antispam, antiphishing and messaging security software and appliances. SonicWall plans to tightly couple MailFrontier&'s products with its own line of firewall, Web-filtering, remote-access and data-protection tools, taking the existing interoperability of the two product lines to the next level, said John DiLullo, vice president of sales at SonicWall, Sunnyvale, Calif.

The deal, expected to close before the end of the month if federal regulatory approval goes smoothly, should strike fear in the hearts of many of SonicWall&'s competitors in the secure messaging and firewall market, said Douglas Brockett, vice president and general manager at the company.

SonicWall rivals, including Symantec and CipherTrust, should be particularly concerned by a combined SonicWall and MailFrontier, but because of the fragmented nature of the messaging security market, all of SonicWall&'s competition should be put on notice by the merger, he said.

“This [deal] probably has a lot of vendors worried,” Brockett said.

Secure messaging and firewall products are essentially separate devices in a network and will remain so for some time, Brockett said. So, don&'t expect a single box that combines the functionality of SonicWall products with those of MailFrontier&'s any time soon, he said.

Instead, SonicWall-branded MailFrontier products will appear in about six months, and the vendor will develop a single-console interface for managing the two sets of products. The current MailFrontier product suite will be immediately available to SonicWall channel partners. A fully integrated security solution that blends functionality from both vendors would be a much longer-term project, Brockett said.

MailFrontier has about 100 VAR partners and 1,700 customers, and about 80 percent of the company&'s total sales go through those partners, Brockett said. He went on to say that SonicWall has about 10,000 solution provider partners worldwide, and between 30 percent and 40 percent of MailFrontier VARs are also SonicWall resellers. Both vendors have had much success in the midsize and enterprise markets, he said.

“[The MailFrontier acquisition] rounds out SonicWall&'s product solutions very well. Antispam was one of the only missing components they had,” said Koji Mori, general manager of network services at Calsoft Systems, a Torrance, Calif.-based solution provider and SonicWall partner. “I&'ve lost a lot of deals to MailFrontier, so now maybe this is something I can lead with.”

There will be challenges though, Mori said. “MailFrontier is a hosted service so it will be interesting to see how they [SonicWall] manage this,” he said. With the MailFrontier purchase, SonicWall continues to bulk out its product offering. Just last November SonicWall bought data backup vendor Lasso Logic for an undisclosed amount.

THOMAS ZIZZO contributed to this story.