Cyber Patrol grows from filtering to monitoring and bandwidth management

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, Sept, 2001

Products for Internet content filtering are rapidly maturing into offerings that manage all features of an organization's web usage. The new version of Cyber Patrol, a recent EDDIE award winner from SurfControl (Westborough, MA, www.surfcontrol.com), expands to monitoring and bandwidth management capabilities. (See www.computedgazette.com/page3.html for the EDDIEs.)

"It doesn't take very long to figure out that kids shouldn't be accessing Playboy at school," says Susan Getgood, vp of marketing for Cyber Patrol. Now that content filtering is a manageable issue, she says attention has gone to a school's need to make sure bandwidth is used for appropriate educational purposes. Cyber Patrol version 6.0 can monitor activity on the network and identify peak areas of usage -- perhaps daily during the administrative lunch break or seasonally with holiday greetings. The system cannot respond on the fly to peaked usage, say spontaneously blocking an MP3 site to ensure the social studies class gets their media-rich site. However, video or audio intensive sites that are not essential to the curriculum can be blocked at pre-identified peak-usage times.

The goal, says Getgood, is to provide the schools with as much flexibility as possible in managing Internet use. Version 6.0 also gives schools the option to be notified of a violation to their acceptable use policy rather than to simply block sites. This can be adjusted among the user base, perhaps monitoring older students and blocking younger students. A new wizard simplifies customization of the rules to enforce acceptable use policies. Violations are reported immediately by email.

6.0 also expands categories that can be blocked. It is now possible for schools to block chat or web-based email, though they cannot monitor content of those categories. A separate product focused on the corporate market can filter email. Sex education categories have also been refined to allow appropriate materials to certain students.

New reporting capabilities include more than 55 built-in reports to analyze Internet usage. Getgood sees the reports used to refine management of the system, not to guide subscription renewals or other web-based curriculum buying.

The Parent Company

Many of the new capabilities come from parent-company SurfControl and were initially developed for the corporate market. Corporations account for about 70% of SurfControl's business. There is a small business selling to the home, and schools account for the rest. Cuber Patrol, which sells only to schools and the home, is one of many SurfControl products. Other offerings include SuperScout Web Filter for Internet productivity in the corporation; SuperScout Email Fitter to manage content security; and the SurfControl Content Filtering SDK a filtering solution for ISPs, search engines, Internet appliances and ASPs.

SurfControl acquired Cyber Patrol, a division of Mattel, Inc. in the summer of 2000 for $97.5 million in stock and $2.5 million in cash. The August 2000 acquisition of CSM Security Management AG for $17.3 million dollars brought the company into German markets. Those purchases followed the November 1999 acquisition of the SurfWatch division of Spyglass Inc. for $17 million in cash and $12 million in JSB (the former name of SurfControl) equity securities and the April 1999 acquisition of Kansmen Corporation and its corporate filtering tools. A June IPO on the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) raised funds for these acquisitions. SurfControl moved to the full list in London (LSE) in February of 2000 and is now admitted to the technology-focused segment of the London Stock Market. The global company has more than 340 employees.

Getgood continues to seek channel partners to bring Cyber Patrol to K-12 and higher education markets. Current partners include Microsoft, Novell, Cisco and Checkpoint. With K-12 driven by CIPA (the Children's Internet Protection Act) and other needs to manage Internet usage, that market is the primary focus. The new features of 6.0, however, are expected to accelerate interest from higher education.