CipherTrust Maintains Leadership Status in META Group E-Mail Hygiene Vendor Comparison

Business Wire, Dec 7, 2004

ATLANTA -- Company and its IronMail(R) Product Achieve High Marks from Leading IT Security Research Firm for the Second Year in a Row

CipherTrust, the leader in messaging security, today announced it was ranked as one of the industry's leading solution providers in META Group's recently published E-mail Hygiene Vendor Comparison report, in which 12 e-mail hygiene vendors were evaluated. Maintaining its strong leadership position, CipherTrust consistently received high marks across the specific evaluation criteria within the areas of Corporate Specifics, Product Functionality and Platform Specifics.

According to the report, META Group expects vast turmoil in the vendor market as companies exhaust venture capital funding and engage in "ferocious" merger and acquisition activity. META Group takes the position that the vendor landscape will drastically reduce from the 60 plus vendors in the market today down to 10 primary suppliers by 2007. However, buyers cannot afford to wait for market consolidation--mail hygiene issues loom large today and demand immediate resolution.

"Given increasing threats, users must upgrade their mail hygiene capabilities," said Matt Cain, senior vice president of META Group. "A thorough evaluation of mail hygiene vendors--with a focus on matching business needs with supplier competencies--is critical to providing maximum e-mail protection and functionality. It is essential that enterprises establish a comprehensive approach to e-mail hygiene in order to protect the overall health of corporate communications."

When evaluating the vendors, META Group established 12 criteria across three core competencies which it believes shows the most obvious differences between suppliers. These include:

--Corporate Specifics, which includes company size, installed base, and geographic reach

--Product functionality, which includes spam blocking, virus blocking, MTA/Anomaly, secure mail, content filtering and end-user controls

--Platform Specifics, which includes management, reporting and price

CipherTrust received high scores in each of the criteria, resulting in an overall ranking as one of the top two e-mail hygiene vendors in the marketplace.

"CipherTrust is pleased to once again be a leader in META Group's e-mail hygiene report. As Matt Cain suggests, e-mail hygiene has become a very crowded market; but CipherTrust pioneered this market in 2000 and has the most mature, field proven product," said Mike Rothman, VP of marketing at CipherTrust. "In addition, we remain the enterprise market share leader and, as evidenced by our recently launched Connection Control technology, at the forefront of technology innovation. The one message customers should take from the META report is that if you are worried about e-mail hygiene, you need to talk to CipherTrust."

A copy of the META Group report, "E-Mail Hygiene Vendor Comparison" (META Practice 2289, Matt Cain, November 19, 2004) is available for download from CipherTrust's website at http://www.ciphertrust.com/files/pdf/reviews/meta_review_12_04.pdf.> About CipherTrust, Inc.

CipherTrust, Inc. is the leader in messaging security. Recognized as the market leader by IDC, the Company's award-winning IronMail appliance protects the messaging systems of more enterprise e-mail users than any other solution, including more than 30 percent of the Fortune 100. CipherTrust pioneered messaging security by uniquely combining the five critical e-mail security components of spam and fraud prevention, virus and worm protection, policy and content compliance, e-mail privacy, and intrusion prevention into a single easy to deploy and manage platform. The Company is backed by top tier investors including Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners. For more information about CipherTrust, please visit www.ciphertrust.com or call 877.448.8625.

CipherTrust and IronMail are registered trademarks of CipherTrust, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.