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Google to Acquire Postini

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Jul 09, 2007 09:25 AM
from the must-be-a-monday dept.
Businesses Google The Internet Security
Dynamoo writes "Google has announced that it is to acquire Postini, company best known for its corporate spam filtering and security service, but also active in Instant Messaging and compliance area. The deal is to purchase Postini for $625m in cash. The acquisition is slated to enhance Google's application portfolio, and Google will also acquire several very large Blue Chip customers that have previously eluded it."
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[+] A Look At Google's Email Spam Prevention 176 comments
CNet has a story about the security measures Google employs to protect their email systems and fight the never-ending war on spam. Their Postini team, acquired two years ago, has a variety of monitoring tools and automated response systems to find and block undesirable messages. Quoting: "The system scores each message on numerous combinations of criteria, assigning a weight to each and then comparing the score to those in a database of several hundred thousand message types that have been flagged as good or bad from Postini honey pots and customer spam reports. ... To block fresh spam attacks not covered by existing heuristic technologies and viruses not covered by existing signature databases Postini relies on proprietary Zero-Hour technology to identify new outbreaks that show up in the traffic patterns and quarantine them for later rescanning. Customers can also create and build out their own white lists of message senders they trust and blacklist others they don't trust. It takes an average of 150 milliseconds for a message to be scanned by the antivirus engines that Postini licenses from McAfee and Authentium.
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  • Coming soon: Google Airlines (Score:4, Funny)

    by LibertineR (591918) on Monday July 09 2007, @09:33AM (#19800239)
    Hey! It could happen!

    No lines, no waiting, free food and drinks, but the windows are replaced with screens showing advertisements 100% of the time.

    • shh!! dont *give* google these ideas!! they come up w/ them on their own fast enough! At least charge a consulting fee!
    • Nope. The next step is Google Enhanced Reality. You strap on goggles that make everything so much more convenient and simple, but you get ads floating in your peripheral vision like a bashful maiden.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by iago-vL (760581)
        I believe you mean "strap on the googles".
        • Actually, enhanced reality is considerably more interesting than virtual reality.

          Example: the copy machine is jammed. The goggles give you a kind of x-ray vision showing exactly where the jam is, and a line drawing superimposed on the copier animates the next step in removing the jam.

          Example: Take the cell phone company idea of location based services, but instead of sticking it on the phone, overlay the information on the user's perception.

          If you imagine a generalized service of this sort, Google is bett

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by darkmeridian (119044)
      Google would run an airline if doing so would give its computers access to all of the mail and data emanating from random users. Postini software screens the e-mails received by thousands upon thousands of employees of huge corporate entities. Depending on the licensing agreement Postini has in place with its customers, Google may be acquiring a huge database of mail to run its search algorithms through.
    • That's actually a fantastic idea.

      With the introduction of RyanAir [ryanair.com] and EasyJet [easyjet.com] in Europe, air travel has taken off, forcing the standard companies such as British Airways to drop their prices and offer more affordable travel. A passenger on there one said to me, "I travel home to Rome once a month because it's cheaper than driving there."

      My point being, nothing here in North America comes close; we are desperately in need of a discount airline that provides affordable travel. Google could leverage this need
      • I know. I wasnt kidding. This is the future.
      • Yeah, but the distances are short. I can get a $145 round trip ticket from NY to Ft. Lauderdale, FL, which is nearly 200km further. I don't know how much that fare is to Rome, but $77 each way for 1700km is cheaper than the price of gas here in the US for an efficient sedan.
    • Did you know that the windows are actually the weakest part of the airplane, so this wouldn't be such a bad idea. As long as you can still pull the curtains across, of course.

    • Re:Coming soon: Google Airlines (Score:4, Funny)

      by MalHavoc (590724) on Monday July 09 2007, @11:19AM (#19801765) Homepage
      And when you buy your ticket, you can click "I'm feeling lucky" and end up in the middle of nowhere. Awesome!
  • Mark me as OT, but damn. I really wish I could make a startup and sell it to google for $1million let alone the $500M+ these smaller companies seem to be getting.
    • I agree, that seems like waaaay to much for a spam filter.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jshriverWVU (810740)
        Especially when they have their own wonderful top of the line spam filters. The first year I used gmail I never received a single spam. Then I started using my email more publically and after a couple years I might get 2-3 a day but they end up in my spam folder. In the past couple years I can say probably less than 20 spam emails have made it into my inbox. So not sure why they would want to buy this, unless it was to keep competition low. While I like google, and hope this isn't the case, I dont see any o
        • I was stupid enough to provide my gmail address as a mailto: link in a Slashdot submission that got accepted. I now get about 200 spam messages a day in my inbox. Luckily, there seem to be few false positives, and probably only about 0.5% slips through to my inbox. It seems to learn really well.
    • Why, making a startup and earning the said $1million by yourself is no longer an option? Just curious.
      • You get a quicker payoff if someone buys you out. For a million dollar buyout, the company might only be making profits of $200K/year or so.

        I think there is also the perception of Google buying companies to add to their portfolio, not necessarily ones that generate a good profit. I think there might be some hope that you could come up with an interesting idea, not necessarily a very profitable one, and Google would buy you out for the cool factor alone.
    • They have a large customer base and I am told that they were preparing to go public. So this isn't 2 guys in a garage, more like 300 people or so.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Qzukk (229616)

        So this isn't 2 guys in a garage, more like 300 people or so.
        Must be a large garage

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by SatanicPuppy (611928) *
      Well they're 8 years old and they passed 10 million users and a billion messages a day last year, so they're a bit more than a startup.

  • Google will acquire Postini for $625 million in cash

    Mr. Postini: You have the briefcase, Page?

    Brin pulls an uzi from under his jacket.

    Page: Just sign the papers, Postini.

  • Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by js290 (697670) on Monday July 09 2007, @09:44AM (#19800411)
    The institution I work has been using Postini for almost a year now. It works pretty well. But, I've also used DSPAM and Spamassassin, and Postini is definitely not $625M better than either of those two.
    • They don't buy it because it is superior technology. They pay for the customers. Aquiring thousands of customers to which you can sell a product you didn't even have to develop yourself is worth a lot. They are probably also trying to cultivate those customer relationships. Maybe some of those that wants a Google Postini might also want a Google Search or a Google Office?
    • The institution I work has been using Postini for almost a year now. It works pretty well. But, I've also used DSPAM and Spamassassin, and Postini is definitely not $625M better than either of those two.

      I'm guessing you're the one who's right. Results talk. The local ISP I use has been pretty sharp and customer-responsive. They just completed their move AWAY from Postini (I could almost say the other "day" for amusing timing) after several years to a product they believe will be more flexible and respons
    • Yes but DSPAM and Spamassassin don't fit perfectly into Google's plan to co-opt small to mid-size corporate email.

      As a spam-filtering go-between, Google gets right back to their earlier push to get corporate users using for-pay gmail. But now it's a value-added service and doesn't require that you give up exchange (initially).

      When the rest of the google apps catch up, it'll be that much easier to pitch a cut-over.
      I'd imagine the next step would be more application-glue to integrate exchange calendars and p

  • Google buys (Score:5, Insightful)

    by symes (835608) on Monday July 09 2007, @09:47AM (#19800441) Journal
    Googling "google buys" provides a pretty rich and varied list of Google's acquisitions: YouTube, Grand Central, Feedburner, Measure Map... and on and on and on. There's even rumours in some parts that a tie up between Google and Apple might be on the cards. Sorry, but it's getting to the point where "Google buys" stories just aren't informative anymore.
    • Sorry, but it's getting to the point where "Google buys" stories just aren't informative anymore.

      Just you wait until they launch their gBuy service...
    • It's still informative, just not interesting. I was informed by reading this article that Google bought Postini, but I don't care anymore.

  • Sometimes (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Jaaay (1124197)
    I wonder if big companies awash with cash wouldn't be better off doing stuff themselves instead of paying ridiculous premiums. The other interesting thing is how profitable this company is and if google would've earned more buying 625 million $ of government bonds than whatever they'll make during the next few years of this.

    But this isn't always the case, I remember reading "you idiots" comments after news ltd bought myspace for 300(?) million and then reading a few months later how google was paying 800
    • Google is paying for the customer base, not the tech. Getting customers is the hard part, not the engineering.

  • "The acquisition is slated to enhance Google's application portfolio,"

    ... hope they do not become another Jotspot and vanish into thin air.

  • Good News (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Rydian (29123) on Monday July 09 2007, @09:57AM (#19800583)
    We've been using Postini for the past few years, and have had great results with it. I just hope the Google interface design team does some work with Postini. Not that the Postini interface is horrible, but it could use more of the polish that Google brings to their apps.
    • Not that the Postini interface is horrible, but it could use more of the polish that Google brings to their apps.

      I wasn't aware that Google outsourced their interface design to Poland...
  • It is hoped that the speed of the jet ski will help it jump the shark really well.

  • Damn Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MyLongNickName (822545) on Monday July 09 2007, @10:04AM (#19800679) Journal
    Always buying companies instead of innovating.

  • We use Postini and it is GOOD. (Score:3, Informative)

    by IGnatius T Foobar (4328) on Monday July 09 2007, @10:13AM (#19800837) Homepage Journal
    We use Postini here and it's really really good. It reliably filters out nearly all the spam that arrives, and it's fairly inexpensive ($1 per mailbox per month). Scaling it to the size of Google will make it even better. I'm looking forward to it.
  • Cash - so a suitcase of dollar/euro/pound notes then?
  • Postini was bought for an amount roughly 83 times the price AMD paid of Transmeta. That just completely screws with my perceptions of scale regarding the value of companies. And I thought I had a pretty good idea of the number system we use.

    Maybe these companies should just start publishing these numbers in milliards and crores and I would still grasp the value of the transaction about as well...

    Cheers!

  • I had my previous firm using Postini (Score:3, Informative)

    by ashitaka (27544) on Monday July 09 2007, @11:47AM (#19802157) Homepage
    I started off with Spamassassin+CLAMAV and something else and some Exchange server-based rules but the upkeep was time-intensive and the spam were still coming down our wire.

    Then I got Postini and the world changed. Upkeep was mindless, the product was really cheap per mailbox and a huge portion of the spam was stopped at Postini's servers hugely reducing the load on our Spamwall and Exchange servers. In addition, it also gave us mail spooling for when we had to take the Exchange server down or if our Internet connection went out. Nothing was ever lost.

    This is another case of Google finding an excellent product that fits in with their business direction and will enhance their products, not just a Microsoft-type acquisition intended to stifle competition.

  • Now Postini will get access to the Googlebrain! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dr. Spork (142693) on Monday July 09 2007, @02:27PM (#19804517)
    First of all, as many have noted, the point of this is not to adapt Postini tools to Gmail. That may happen eventually, but it's not the point. The point is that Postini offers enterprise services that Google never did, and already has a prominent userbase. And if you ask why enterprises don't just switch to Gmail and get the same spam-filtering for free, you don't understand how enterprises work.

    I don't doubt that some of the spam filtering procedure developed by Postini will eventually help filter Gmail. Indeed, it wouldn't make sense in the long run for Google to keep two separate spam filtering platforms. But here's the point: the primary beneficiary of the buyout will be the Postini spam filter itself, the thing that will be sold for subscription fees to enterprises. That product will improve for one simple reason: Access to the incredible amount of data that Google has access to. We all help Google when we're kind enough to press the "mark as spam" button in Gmail. And I'm sure they remember, and our entry sharpens up whatever Bayesian algorithm Google uses to detect future spam. When Google's data merges with Postini's data, it will be very hard for other enterprise spam filtering providers to offer a product of similar effectiveness. To do so, they would need to store their own databases on a scale large enough to compete with Google - which isn't cheap. It is cheap for Google to supply Postini filters with raw data, since Google collect that data anyway. So Postini the pay service gets an incredible competitive advantage though it's intergration with the Googlebrain. That's not to mention the extra mindshare that the Google brand brings with it.

    For those of us who wondered how Google plans to profit from all this investment in a free email service, this is a part of the answer: There will be a for-pay enterprise version based on the same investment. The same goes for Search, btw. So pay attention: this is Google trying to become something more than an ad pusher. And it's not a dumb idea: the marginal cost for Google to develop a good for-pay spam filtering system is small compared to the money they could sell it for.

    And since you can already buy Google computers to search your enterprise for internal data, and those Google computers are heavily based on work Google developed for other goals (and for free access), we might ask the following question: What other things is Google good at, and would enterprises be interested in paying for products based on those skills? Google maps? For sure! But consider Google News, the human-free, smart organizer of articles by subject, relevance and prominence. Are there companies with a lot of data that could benefit from the sort of organization alorithms that run Google News? Damn right! Each year more enterprises are finding that the cheapness of data storage left them with attics of archival data that's a complete mess. I think we're starting to understand the "???" that separated Google's free services and Profit.

    • You've got that wrong. They're acquiring a truly nasty coffee substitute made from burned wheat flour and molasses. Obviously, they're afraid of their geeks getting coffee nerves [lileks.com].

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MindKata (957167)
        I wish it was just nasty coffee. Google owning a company that handles things like email "information security" is like a wolf owning a Chicken Farm. So I guess that means the emails etc.. will be secure (provided you don't mind Google also taking a look as well).

        So Google takes one more step along the road from "Do No Harm" to "1984 Big Brother"

    • Googlini

      Yeah, it has a better sound to it than some of the alternatives. Anybody wanna Poogle?

      • How about Postle? Usage:"I have a Postle running on my email account to filter out all my spam except for unobtrusive,targeted ones specifically catering to my internet usage".

        Cheers!
    • Does "in cash" really mean what I think it means? (Posting as AC, as I am too embarassed to admit I don't get this language as much as I thought I did)

      No, it doesn't mean that they'll show up with a suitcase (or truck) full of bills. It simply means that the purchase will happen with currency of some sort (likely bank transfers and such), rather than paying for it with Google stock (the value of which fluctuates--well, it fluctuates moreso than hard currency).
    • It doesn't mean cash as in coins or notes; a cheque or bank transfer is very easily converted to cash in comparison to paying with shares. Google bought YouTube for $1.65bn in shares for example.

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