Fresh off its controversial buyout
of McAfee.com, Santa Clara-based Network Associates has gobbled up anti-spam
software firm Deersoft Inc. and announced plans for to go shopping for
anti-spam and content filtering technologies.
Financial terms of the Deersoft acquisition were not released but Network
Associates said the purchase included technologies
associated with Deersoft’s consumer and enterprise anti-spam products.
Immediately, the plans are to incorporate Deersoft’s technology with the
McAfee Spamkiller Enterprise product and deliver a desktop software for
corporate clients. The integrated anti-spam software would be delivered at
the gateway, email server and desktop for enterprise customers.
Later in 2003, McAfee’s enterprise policy manager — ePolicy Orchestrator
(ePO) — will be upgraded to manage SpamKiller Enterprise, Network
Associates announced. With the coming upgrade, ePO will be tweaked to manage
spam, McAfee and competitors’ anti-virus products as well as personal
firewalls, gateway and email protection from a single tool.
In the second half of this year, Network Associates said it would
integrate the Deersoft technology into the McAfee WebShield and GroupShield
products to provide protection for Internet gateways and email servers.
Deersoft, out of Palo Alto, Calif., is best known for its SpamAssassin
spam filters. SpamAssassin, an open-source product, later became
SpamAssassin Pro for Microsoft Outlook. The company’s anti-spam products
conducts more than 750 tests and heuristic scans to analyze messages and
identify spam.
“[This] acquisition of Deersoft is the first in a series of investments
McAfee is making into anti-spam and content filtering technology…We have
acquired extensions to the leading open source ‘black list’ application and
we will add applications that detect spammers even before they appear on
black lists, supplementing that with the ability for customers to filter
internal content with very tight control,” said Mcafee President Art
Matin.
Networks Associates competes with the likes of Check Point Software,
Computer Associates and Symantec. It vends network security software in
three product groups: McAfee Security, Sniffer Technologies and Magic
Solutions.