What began as Vipul's Razor has become a global corporation serving telecoms giants worldwide, but a new product with a SpamAssasssin tie-in brings the company back to its roots.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 15, 2007]

San Francisco, Calif.-based Cloudmark sends a team to our office that includes CEO Hugh McCartney and senior director of product marketing Dave Champine to talk about the company's success in all markets in all nations.

"Historically, we have focused on the top tier ISPs," admits McCartney. "We recently added EarthLink and Comcast."

"Companies are looking beyond the technology to companies who can help them grow and improve the user experience," says Champine. "Our focus is on empowering the end user."

The company is now profitable, McCartney says, and has opened offices in Hong Kong and London. He is bullish about the European market. He says that whereas there as been significant consolidation in the United States, each European nation still has its own companies, perhaps three per nation, so he sees 50 to 60 potential tier one customers there. "I expect Europe to provide 30 to 35 percent of our revenues this year," he says.

"This year???"

"Yes," he smiles.

SpamAssassin
"For tier 2 and 3 customers, distribution is a challenge for us," says McCartney. "We're a technology company, not a marketing machine. We've never needed mass marketing to reach the tier 1 ISPs. We've relied on word of mouth."

So the company built a plug-in for SpamAssassin. It's not a free plug-in, but Vipul Ved Prakash, Cloudmark's founder and chief scientist, has worked with the SpamAssassin team for a long time (Vipul's Razor was released in 1998).

"We contacted Justin Mason," explains Champine. "We wanted to be suitable to the Apache project. The last thing we wanted to do was to contact SpamAssassin users and criticize it and say, 'use us.' Justin sees SpamAssassin as a platform with a plug-in architecture."

One benefit of working with tiers 2 and 3 is quick sales. "We just heard from one guy who told us it took him longer to find the tarball in his e-mail than to install it," says Champine.

He says that the company assumed it was competing with the free price of SpamAssassin but found that companies experiencing a doubling of e-mail volume every year (and a doubling of spam every year) are comparing Cloudmark to commercial solutions. If you've already got SpamAssassin, integration's not a problem. Buying a new solution, on the other hand, involves integration costs and consultant fees.

"We've had customers go live before we knew about them," says McCartney.

So what do the tier 1 customers get that the plug-in customers don't? "Some services are not provided by the plug-in, some reporting is not bundled, and there's no integration with billing," says Champine.

McCartney says again that his company is focused on technology. "I don't want to be a services organization. Our revenues doubled in each of the last two years and we added ten people to staff."

Champine says he thought he'd be selling this based on features and price, but says that ROI is big selling point.

Mobile Users are Virgins
The future of Cloudmark, the team says, is in protecting mobile users. Mobile users are vulnerable to attacks against handset operating system. The typical mobile interface doesn't allow a user to check a suspicious message in many of the ways we take for granted on a PC, such as checking the sender's address or the URL of a link in the message.

Mobile users on most networks are protected by the fees charged for access. But some mobile networks, particularly in South East Asia, now have users with unlimited data plans.

Mobile users are not accustomed to being attacked. "It's a naïve community," says Champine. Spammers are taking advantage of this by using phishing attacks. They're not spamming ads; they're installing key loggers.

"A credit card number is worth about $1 online," says McCartney. "But with the mother's maiden name, pet's name, mailing address, and so on, it worth closer to $60."

If the telcos can protect their mobile networks, they will be able to sell ads on it. If they cannot protect the network, if trust is broken, any potential ads will have no value.

—End