November 14, 2016
April 13, 2016
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing 2015
Magic Quadrant
Source: Gartner (December 2015)
28 December 2015 | ID:G00273007
Analyst(s): Adam Preset, Whit Andrews
December 09, 2015
Cisco Spark Grows Up
Today at the eighth-annual Cisco Collaboration Summit taking place in San Francisco, the company unveiled a series of enhancements that, as promised, turn its Spark collaboration application into a platform.
Regular No Jitter readers and industry watchers will recall that Cisco previewed its collaboration application as Project Squared at last year's summit. It then formally launched the app under the new Cisco Spark brand and announced general availability at Enterprise Connect 2015 in March.
I take my title from the opening comments of Ross Daniels, Cisco senior director, collaboration marketing leader, during an hour-long pre-briefing for industry analysts last Friday. Kudos to Daniels, a 15-year Cisco contact center and collaboration veteran, on an excellent session. He has worked with so many of us for so long that he wasn't just prepared for our questions, but he often predicted which analyst would ask which question.
While Cisco has made an enormous investment in Spark, it recognizes that "a massive portion of our installed base, indeed of the market as a whole, still wants to have one foot, one leg, half a body remaining in the on-prem world," Daniels said. "We aim to help them extend the value of that prem investment while allowing them to participate in cloud services."
Recalling Cisco Collaboration Summit 2015, Daniels pointed to the declaration there by Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group, that "we're showing you an app, but we're building a platform." Cisco is now making good on that promise, turning Spark into a full collaboration and communications platform with a number of services, Daniels said.
Spark Calling Service
Arguably the most important of those services, which you can see in the graphic above, is Cisco Spark Service. With this offering, for small and medium-sized businesses and the midmarket, Cisco will go head to head with cloud communications providers such as 8x8 and RingCentral. Cisco describes the Spark calling service as "a complete business collaboration service from the Cisco cloud that enables customers to message, meet, or call anyone, anywhere, and anytime."
Those of you familiar with the Cisco collaboration app will know that users have been able to make Spark-to-Spark calls for a while. The Spark calling service is an extension, or as Daniels said, "a re-invention," of that providing full cloud PBX capabilities under the Spark brand.
The Spark calling service includes:
- Full dial capability
- Enterprise directory, including optional integration to on-premises Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange systems
- PSTN connectivity through "preferred media partners"
"The calling service is new code. This is not a port of Unified Communications Manager to the cloud. This is built from the start as a cloud PBX. The same way that we built Spark as a messaging service, we built the calling service as a cloud PBX," Daniels said.
In other words, he added, Spark calling service is not available for on-premises use. "It's just not possible -- it is true multitenant."
Voice Peering
Cisco has not announced which of its preferred media partners will provide the PSTN services. That information should come closer to the first-quarter 2016 availability Cisco has planned for the Spark calling service, Daniels said. He did say, however, that Cisco will form peering relationships with those providers for voice calling.
Voice peering refers to the forwarding of calls from one service provider to another directly using VoIP technology. In other words, the peering arrangements will let Spark calls move from one VoIP cloud to another without needing to traverse the PSTN and taking the transcoding hit that would require. This means Cisco should be able to offer the service at lower cost and better quality than it could in the absence of peering partners. I suspect that existing Cisco Intercloudpartners such as British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, and Telstra will be on the list of preferred media partners for Spark the Service.
Hosted by Cisco, Sold by Partners
Cisco will host the Spark platform in its data centers for partners to resell. This is in line with how Cisco has offered Spark to date, as well as how it sells its WebEx Web conferencing service, but represents a departure from how Cisco has handled its premises-based collaboration offerings and sold its Hosted Collaboration Service (HCS). This is a major change -- and potentially a challenge -- for the company, which for years has emphasized a go-to-market model based on its technology hosted within partner data centers.
"We've been briefing major HCS partners for several months. There are no secrets here; they know what we have been doing," Daniels said.
Cisco believes existing HCS partners will have opportunities as Cisco Spark services expand, Daniels said. The Spark platform will allow partners -- presumably more easily than was true with HCS -- to extend the services they offer beyond voice into conferencing, video, and collaboration, he added.
Similar to the flurry of posts that followed on the announcements of Project Squared, Unify's Circuit nee Project Ansible, and Interactive Intelligence's PureCloud, No Jitter will be filled this week with stories coming from Collaboration Summit. Look for another by me on Spark for Developers, which will highlight the integration Altocloud announced with Cisco Spark and other Spark implications for the contact center market.
January 18, 2015
Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing 2014
VIEW SUMMARY
Web conferencing is a foundational capability for accelerated decision making and a strategic requirement for real-time collaboration and communications in the digital workplace. This Magic Quadrant assesses 13 significant vendors to help enterprise buyers select the right solution for their needs.
Market Definition/Description
Web-conferencing products are real-time collaboration tools that support interactions over a network between participants in multiple meeting formats. Types of meetings and communications that fall into the category of Web conferencing include collaborative meetings, learning and training, and webinars. Some vendors segment their product lines to target and scale to each of those use cases, while others offer a broad solution that can be fitted to each purpose. A separate telephone bridge is sometimes used for the audio portion, with a callback feature desirable, but voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in the browser or client is often available and simple to use. Video between desktops, smartphones or tablets is essential to meetings. Vendor offerings are increasingly enabling users not only to participate in, but also to host meetings from mobile devices with video. For VoIP and video support, accessories such as headsets and webcams should be included in the purchasing decision, because wise investments here will improve the quality of the user experience and foster adoption. Company laptop PCs and mobile devices with built-in video cameras are common.
The Web-conferencing market consists of offerings that are predominantly cloud-based, although buyers still need hybrid, on-premises, managed and dedicated deployment options. Web conferencing is still a stand-alone market, but is more frequently becoming a key requirement in purchasing decisions for unified communications and collaboration (UCC). Capabilities span a range from low-end freemium to high-end premium services. Historically, enterprise buyers have been from lines of business (LOBs) where support for specific use cases (such as training, and sales and marketing webinars) is needed. Strategic decisions involve enterprise IT around broader UCC initiatives.
Web conferencing benefits businesses in various ways. It can help to reduce geographic barriers for teams that need to work on projects or specific business processes. Training can be rolled out virtually, to employees in multiple locations. There are potential productivity increases and cost reductions from reducing business travel. Because of worldwide economic trends, Web conferencing has become not only a way to cut expenses, but also the preferred method of communication (ahead of travel) in many organizations. Organizations often make conscious decisions that separate Web conferencing for internal use — for collaboration and learning — from external use for marketing, and will run products from more than one vendor. With Web-conferencing tools, enterprises can also benefit from engaging with external constituents, such as business partners and customers, to continually build those relationships.
Magic Quadrant
Source: Gartner (December 2014)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Adobe
Adobe Connect (www.adobe.com) is offered as SaaS, hybrid, on-premises or managed service deployments.
Strengths
- Adobe offers a portfolio of solutions that accommodates key use cases, from collaboration to training and webinars, along with a sophisticated set of prebuilt integration pods and APIs for customization.
- Features such as breakout rooms and an engagement dashboard (leveraging Adobe's analytics platform) speak to its suitability for training, and its hybrid and on-premises deployment options appeal to government customers wishing to control services themselves.
- Presenters hosting meetings from devices will find that the Adobe Connect mobile apps have controls that are nearly equal to the desktop applications.
Cautions
- Adobe's focus on its Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud portfolios results in less visible emphasis on horizontal offerings such as Adobe Connect — which integrates with other products such as Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics and Adobe EchoSign.
- Adobe Connect on the desktop relies on Flash Player — distributed with Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 and with Windows 8, but also a necessary download for other browsers and operating systems (OSs) — in order to function.
- Adobe Connect may be preferable for specific advanced use cases, rather than general basic collaboration, as suggested by its reference customers.
Arkadin
ArkadinAnywhere (www.arkadin.com) is offered as SaaS.
Strengths
- ArkadinAnywhere runs directly in the browser with no necessary downloads or plug-ins.
- Arkadin offers live chat, phone and in-meeting support by local personnel in 32 countries and 18 languages, which may be advantageous for global enterprises.
- ArkadinAnywhere is easy to use and low-cost, as reported by references.
Cautions
- Arkadin was acquired by global network service provider NTT Communications during 2014. This extends its footprint beyond Europe and North America, Arkadin's main markets, and justifies its re-examination by buyers looking for a global offering.
- ArkadinAnywhere lacks advanced features such as HD video and HD audio, and its APIs for integration are limited to provisioning and call control. Buyers with those requirements will have to review other vendors' Web-conferencing products that Arkadin resells as a channel partner (Adobe and Cisco, for example).
- Administration of the ArkadinAnywhere service needs improvement in areas such as upgrade process and notifications, and tools to delegate administration and account provisioning to local internal support; all issues cited by reference customers that Arkadin proposes to address in new end-user and administrator portals by the end of 2014.
AT&T
AT&T Connect (www.att.com) is offered as a SaaS, hybrid, on-premises or managed service.
Strengths
- AT&T has a flexible deployment model that allows blending of premises-based cloud services, enabling consolidation of load at high-volume sites and failover to cloud for usage spikes.
- AT&T's Hybrid Virtual Desktop will appeal to enterprises that must deliver Web conferences over virtual desktop infrastructure.
- AT&T's understanding of business needs and strong management of account relationships are key reasons why its reference customers select its products.
Cautions
- AT&T Connect does not offer HD video or HD audio.
- AT&T's range of pricing options, from per-minute usage with no commitment to per-host flat rate monthly subscriptions, may require close management for cost-efficiency.
- AT&T's user interface, product customization, accounting and reporting features are limited and need improvement, according to customer references.
Blackboard
Blackboard Collaborate (www.blackboard.com) is offered as SaaS.
Strengths
- Blackboard accommodates key use cases, from collaboration to training and webinars with up to 1,000 participants.
- Blackboard Collaborate includes a rich set of accessibility features, including multiple streams of closed captioning, enlarged video, scaling of content area, an activity window for screen readers, auditory event notification, keyboard navigation and accelerator keys for menus, navigation and common functions.
- References indicated that Blackboard's understanding of the needs of users in education and training, including integration with learning management systems and ease of use, were key influences in their product selection.
Cautions
- Blackboard's focus on learning use cases may make it less tenable for enterprise collaboration, which requires features such as Outlook integration, feature parity for presenter controls between desktop and mobile clients, or browser-only options for meeting guests.
- Blackboard's products and licensing are in transition, which may call for some buyers to migrate from Wimba Classroom and Elluminate Live products to Collaborate (now cloud-only with no on-premises option), or from legacy per-user licensing to cloud subscription based on organization size.
- Client setup and resolving issues with Java can be more time-consuming than expected, according to Blackboard's reference customers. Blackboard proposes to integrate a browser-only experience, enabled by its 2014 acquisition of Requestec.
Cisco
Cisco WebEx Enterprise Edition (www.cisco.com), which includes Meeting Center, Training Center, Event Center and Support Center, is offered as SaaS.
Strengths
- WebEx includes a portfolio of solutions that accommodates key use cases, together with a rich set of enterprise communications and conferencing service integrations.
- Mature global infrastructure has contributed to driving high-volume usage of the WebEx platform among organizations with varying technology adoption profiles — from conservative to mainstream to aggressive.
- WebEx integrates with enterprise telecommunications, telepresence and group video systems through Cisco Collaboration Meeting Rooms, which, together with ease of use, are the key reasons why reference customers select WebEx.
Cautions
- Cisco is in the process of transitioning its video and Web-conferencing business units into one that is aligned to develop and support converged conferencing products. This will force IT planners to re-examine whether Cisco's integration will be sufficient for their needs, or if third-party integrators are a better fit for price and functionality.
- Voice can be handled in a variety of ways — including VoIP in the browser, WebEx Cloud Connected Audio, and third-party conferencing providers — and selecting the best-fit option for price and functionality is complex.
- WebEx customers have cited support, licensing models and leveraging resellers effectively as challenges for Cisco.
Citrix
Citrix (www.citrix.com) GoToMeeting, GoToTraining, GoToWebinar and GoToAssist are offered as SaaS.
Strengths
- Citrix offers a portfolio of solutions that accommodates key use cases, from collaboration to training and webinars, along with strong integration with CRM and APIs for customization.
- Citrix's GoToMeeting offering has kept pace with enterprise collaboration needs such as Outlook integration, feature parity for presenter controls between desktop and mobile clients, HD video, and support for compliance.
- GoToMeeting is easy to use, a key influencing factor in product selection according to its references.
Cautions
- Attendees using GoToMeeting Web Viewer should be aware that it requires Flash Player (distributed with Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8, but also a necessary download for other browsers and OSs) and will not be able to share video unless they install the full desktop application. A browser-only experience, no plug-in and zero download, is currently achieved in GoToMeeting Free.
- The Citrix offering is a cloud-only deployment, and the vendor reports that a cloud-based recording service is on its road map. Currently, however, all recording of meetings, training sessions and webinars can be captured only with the rich desktop client.
- GoToMeeting reference customers expressed concern over sporadic issues with stability and an impression that capacity issues are handled reactively. Citrix reports that it has transitioned to a dynamic capacity model during 2014, to improve performance and scalability.
Fuze
Fuze (www.fuze.com) is offered as SaaS.
Strengths
- Fuze has a simple, cost-effective subscription pricing model for meeting hosts and rooms.
- Fuze has kept pace with enterprise collaboration needs such as Outlook integration, feature parity for presenter controls between desktop and mobile clients, HD video and voice, and support for compliance.
- Reference customers for Fuze emphasize ease of use, integration with videoconferencing, high-quality voice, federated single sign-on, and continuous engagement and support from the vendor as sources of satisfaction.
Cautions
- Fuze may be dismissed due to its initial focus on Europe and North America (its main markets), but recent partnership with BT justifies re-examination of its services and costs for buyers in global organizations.
- The Fuze client is not as feature-rich, nor does the platform have as many mature integrations and APIs, as its competitors.
- Areas for improvement include a fully functional browser-only client and an increase in the current meeting attendee limit of 250, both concerns raised by Fuze's reference customers.
Google Hangouts (www.google.com/work/apps/business/products/hangouts/) is offered as SaaS.
Strengths
- The bundling of Hangouts and its tight integration with other collaboration tools within the Google Apps for Work suite is compelling in functionality and pricing for those organizations already invested in Google.
- Chromebox for Meetings (introduced in February 2014) leverages the Hangouts software and infrastructure, can be managed as part of a Google Apps domain and is an accessible entry point for Google customers who want to extend collaboration into meeting rooms.
- References emphasize the ease of use and cost-effectiveness of Hangouts.
Cautions
- While the current limit of 15 video endpoints may meet users' needs for internal collaboration, enterprises may not find Hangouts tenable for larger internal learning and training sessions or confidential large-scale internal meetings such as town halls.
- Guests joining a Web-conferencing session are required to authenticate via a Google Apps customer account or Gmail account.
- Enterprises that require private or internal meeting recording (as essential to their business processes or for compliance) will need to investigate third-party desktop capture, because Google's option, Hangouts On Air, publishes recordings publicly on its YouTube platform and restricting privacy to a domain is possible only after the fact.
IBM
IBM (www.ibm.com) offers Sametime Conference in on-premises or managed service deployments, and IBM Connections Meetings Cloud as SaaS.
Strengths
- IBM Sametime Conference and IBM Connections Meetings Cloud are offerings suitable for key use cases, from collaboration to training and webinars, with mobile meetings that are close in parity to the desktop experience.
- IBM's solutions are well-suited to global enterprises due to the rich ecosystem of sales, technical and implementation partners.
- Sametime's strong integration with other collaboration tools and IBM cloud services, and IBM's strength in managing account relationships, are key influencers in the choices of its reference customers.
Cautions
- The transition of the branding of IBM's collaboration portfolio (from IBM SmartCloud for Social Business to IBM Connections Meetings Cloud), as well as the options to buy Meetings Cloud unbundled or to license and run Sametime on-premises, calls for potential buyers to seek clarity on the exact fit for their needs.
- Video support is available only in Sametime, not in the Meetings Cloud offering, although IBM reports that video is in its product road map.
- References express concern that the service architecture is complex and would benefit from simplification. They have also experienced issues with client software, plug-ins and the requirement for Java, which IBM proposes to remove from the browser experience by the end of 2014.
InterCall
Unified Meeting (www.intercall.com) is offered as SaaS, hybrid or a managed service.
Strengths
- InterCall has a rich partner ecosystem that allows extension of its platforms via federation, unified communications, collaboration and integration providers.
- Unified Meeting leverages many of InterCall's significant audioconferencing features, notably hybrid audio over the public switched telephone network or VoIP, tunneled VoIP, detailed accounting and billing, and project codes.
- Unified Meeting has attractive pricing and total cost of ownership as well as strong integration with audioconferencing — according to its references.
Cautions
- Unified Meeting lacks features such as HD video and integration with room video systems, so buyers with those requirements will have to review other vendors' Web-conferencing products that InterCall resells as a channel partner (Adobe and Cisco, for example).
- InterCall's mobile app, MobileMeet, allows joining only the audio portion of a Web conference; participants cannot see the screen-share or video. However, InterCall's road map proposes to add screen sharing and video during 2015.
- Unified Meeting's user interface, pace of offering new features and the stability of its Outlook plug-in are potential concerns, according to its reference customers, although InterCall has performed significant refreshes in these areas since our survey.
Microsoft
Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) offers Lync Server for hybrid and on-premises deployments, and Lync Online as SaaS.
Strengths
- Lync Online's tight integration as part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite is compelling in functionality and pricing for those organizations looking for an integrated cloud collaboration solution from Microsoft.
- Lync Server and Lync Online features, such as Outlook integration, offer parity for presenter controls between desktop and mobile clients, plus HD video and voice. Rich APIs match the needs of the enterprise.
- Lync integrates with videoconferencing services and is easy to use, which are key reasons for product selection by reference customers.
Cautions
- There is no integrated cloud or server-based recording, and meetings can be captured only with the rich desktop client; this may be a concern for organizations that require recordings for certain business processes or compliance.
- Lync Online does not support meetings of more than 250 participants, and those customers planning to transition from hosted Live Meeting (which allows 1,250 participants) must plan to wait, and hold to existing contracts and enterprise agreements, until Microsoft provides an alternative option with comparable scalability — Lync Broadcast Meeting, which was publicly announced during 2014.
- End users may find that the video and presenter controls, user interface and video quality in the Lync client need improvement — according to Microsoft's reference customers.
PGi
PGi's (www.pgi.com) iMeet and GlobalMeet are SaaS offerings.
Strengths
- PGi has simple, cost-effective subscription pricing models for all-you-can-meet and per-minute audio, for both simple face-to-face Web video meetings with iMeet (125-attendee limit) and more complex collaborative meetings and webinars with GlobalMeet (325-attendee limit).
- PGi's services leverage its significant audioconferencing capabilities, notably HD audio, dial-out and connect-me functionality, and detailed reporting.
- Both iMeet and GlobalMeet are easy to use and have attractive pricing, and PGi's customer service focus has been a key influencer in its selection by reference customers.
Cautions
- iMeet and GlobalMeet lack advanced features such as HD video and integration with room video systems, so buyers with those requirements will have to review other vendors' Web-conferencing products that PGi resells as a channel partner (Adobe and Cisco, for example).
- iMeet and GlobalMeet on the desktop rely on Flash Player — distributed in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 and with Windows 8, but also a necessary download for other browsers and OSs — in order to function.
- Feature parity between the desktop and mobile experiences, and a lack of availability in certain geographies are limitations identified by PGi's customer references.
Vidyo
Vidyo (www.vidyo.com) is offered as a SaaS, hybrid, on-premises or managed service.
Strengths
- Vidyo's solutions are well-suited to scenarios in which video is the main component of the collaboration, and client stability and adaptation to low-bandwidth, high-latency conditions are concerns.
- VidyoDesktop Virtual Edition (VE) is worth examining for those enterprises challenged to deliver Web-conferencing services to a Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure.
- Vidyo's integration with third-party videoconferencing systems — such as its VidyoH20 product that connects Google Hangouts to Polycom, Lifesize and others — and its video quality and delivery optimization capabilities were key reasons for product selection by references.
Cautions
- VidyoWeb, needed for guests to join via a Web browser, is a necessary plug-in download.
- Vidyo's focus on video collaboration use cases may make it less tenable for learning and training and webinar scenarios, which require features such as polling, Q&A management, engagement indicators and analytics.
- Meeting recording requires VidyoReplay, a hardware appliance. A software approach was expressed as desirable by Vidyo's reference customers.
Vendors Added and Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
Added
- Arkadin now meets our inclusion criteria and has been added.
- Google now meets our inclusion criteria and has been added.
- Vidyo now meets our inclusion criteria and has been added.
Dropped
- Dialcom was removed following its acquisition by ClearOne, because it no longer meets the inclusion criteria for revenue.
- Saba was removed because its market focus has narrowed to providing Web conferencing in support of its talent management and HR software.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
We applied the following criteria for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant:
- The product must provide at least the following minimal functionality:
- Presentation delivery. All participants can see an online presentation (usually delivered by Microsoft PowerPoint), which is under the control of one participant who is designated the presenter.
- Desktop or application sharing. All participants can see, but not necessarily directly interact with or modify, the presenter's desktop or a specific application on the presenter's system.
- Text chat. Participants can exchange real-time textual messages with other participants or the presenter using an IM-like interface.
- Shared whiteboard. A meeting participant can add annotations — viewable by all — by typing or drawing on a whiteboard application, or on top of a presentation or shared application window.
- Basic security. Encrypted data transfer and password-protected meetings.
- Remote control. Useful for technical support, this gives one participant control of applications or the desktop on another system.
- Integrated VoIP audio. To remove or reduce the need for telephone-based audio, qualifying products must use a speaker and microphone (or a headset) to enable participants to listen and speak.
- Video. Qualifying products must show live video feeds of participants or the presenter from a desktop webcam or mobile device camera.
- Mobility. Qualifying products must have specific support for mobile devices and tablets.
- The product must support at least five participants. Products that support one-to-one interaction or small groups are generally aimed at the consumer market or at other specialized markets not covered by this Magic Quadrant.
- The vendor must have at least $7 million in annual revenue from sales of Web-conferencing products.
- The vendor must provide at least one reference with more than 1,000 seats of internal users.
- Sales and marketing efforts connected with the product must not be limited primarily to a particular vertical or horizontal process (such as training).
- The vendor must develop and market the primary Web-conferencing product, not resell a white-label product produced by another company in an OEM relationship. The product can be the result of an acquisition.
Service providers such as Arkadin, AT&T, InterCall and PGi are included in this Magic Quadrant because they market and develop their own Web-conferencing offerings. They also resell other vendors' products, but those are not considered in this evaluation.
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Several factors contribute to the vendors' ratings for Ability to Execute:
- We evaluated the capabilities of the vendors' products separately for basic and advanced functionality.
- Because this market includes many small vendors with uncertain futures, financial viability was an important factor.
- We evaluated pricing in terms of comparative pricing levels and the vendors' flexibility in supporting the kinds of pricing models that customers want (such as concurrent user, named user, per minute and flat rate).
- We judged the customer experience by speaking to Gartner clients that use the products and by surveying users identified as reference customers by the vendors.
Source: Gartner (December 2014)
Completeness of Vision
We evaluated the vendors' Completeness of Vision by examining customers' requirements for usage and purchasing, and by assessing how the products aligned with these requirements:
- To evaluate vendors' marketing and product strategies, we looked at how they position their products and whether their products adequately address the chosen positioning.
- We rated the vendors' flexibility in supporting both SaaS and on-premises deployment models more highly than a strategy of concentrating on a single deployment model.
- We also evaluated vendors' product innovation and ability to address the trends we expect to see in the Web-conferencing market.
Source: Gartner (December 2014)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have achieved significant market share, while demonstrating an ability to respond to customers' needs. Leaders have robust, scalable products with a wide range of features, a large installed base, acceptable financial performance and good distribution. Leaders are doing well today and are prepared for the future.
Challengers
Vendors in the Challengers quadrant are characterized by operational excellence and good standing in the market. Compared with vendors in the Leaders and Visionaries quadrants, either they do not have long-term road maps or their products lack some features.
Visionaries
Visionaries typically have important, unique and/or well-developed technical capabilities and provide key innovations that illustrate the future of the market. However, they have not yet developed the sales and support capabilities to address or influence the whole market.
Niche Players
Niche Players may have good technology, but are limited by their size, breadth of product line, track record in the market, vertical or horizontal focus, geographic niche, and/or financial circumstances. Some have chosen a niche strategy (for example, regional vendors with a local focus or targeted functionality intended to run on top of, or alongside, other technologies).
Context
Web-conferencing services are still purchased mainly by departments and LOBs. IT leaders responsible for collaboration, real-time technology and infrastructure should:
- Assess and inventory existing real-time assets.
- Engage technical architects to map out future architecture with respect to real-time technologies.
- Influence sourcing/procurement officers to ensure that future investments in real time are aligned to, and can be integrated with, the architecture.
More than ever, Web-conferencing decisions need to be made together with other decisions about communications and collaboration infrastructure. Mobility and video support have also emerged as core decision criteria when buyers evaluate Web-conferencing offerings.
Market Overview
Web-conferencing services are deployed via several different delivery models, with SaaS as the most prominent — although there are options for on-premises, hybrid and managed services, and there are buyers for all. The vendors in this market consist of service providers (such as Arkadin, AT&T, InterCall and PGi), UCC vendors (such as Cisco, Google, IBM and Microsoft), collaboration and training vendors (such as Blackboard), best-of-breed Web-conferencing vendors (such as Adobe and Citrix), and vendors that blend video and Web-conferencing capabilities (such as Fuze and Vidyo). Buyers gravitate toward one of these focus areas as they select vendors to investigate.
Trends
There are several trends affecting the market, from pricing to pervasive video and mobility support. Smaller and lower-cost vendors continue to disrupt pricing dynamics, resulting in downward-facing pricing pressure that is causing changes in licensing models to justify charging a premium for Web-conferencing services. In addition to vendors offering free trials, many offer freemium models — usually with modest functionality for small meetings. These are intended to hook users and then influence LOBs, or even central IT and procurement, on an upsell to premium services with more enterprise features. Of particular note are two distinctly different approaches to the topic: Adobe discontinued its freemium offering during 2013, and Citrix introduced GoToMeeting Free in 2Q14 following its successful experiment (Hutt) in browser-based video rooms.
Interest in contextual collaboration continues to rise, adding real-time communications capabilities such as Web conferencing into office collaboration, social networking and CRM applications. It is becoming more common to see those capabilities a single click away within a business application, either within the software packages themselves or via integrations and middleware meant to improve responsiveness, time to market or partner collaboration.
The integration of Web-conferencing capabilities with UCC infrastructure gives UCC vendors strong leverage in enterprises. Best-of-breed vendors must ensure integration with UCC offerings to gain further traction into enterprises beyond an individual LOB. Democratization of video by leveraging mobile endpoints — through bring your own device (BYOD) or corporately owned, personally enabled (COPE) programs — is complicated by requirements to support multiple form factors, mobile OSs and browsers. Deployments of inexpensive room video systems backed by Web-conferencing technology seem to be favored above new builds of expensive telepresence.
Large-scale webcasting is the purview of specialist vendors such as ON24 or TalkPoint (acquired by PGi in 3Q14), but at the more modest scale of a few hundred or thousand attendees for a company town hall or quarterly shareholder meeting, it is increasingly common to see high-end Web-conferencing vendors or enterprise video content managers handle the use case for live streaming.
Rich client applications on the desktop and native mobile apps continue to offer the most features and functionality for presenters; however, the common expectation is for a reasonable experience for guests in a browser-only mode with no plug-ins. An emerging area of interest and investment for vendors is HTML5 and its related protocols, such as Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC). The promise of WebRTC is that real-time communication, such as video, can occur in the browser and between browsers. While still early in its development, this has the potential to disrupt current conferencing delivery models — where a majority of offerings require users to download a client. The more recently a vendor has entered the space, the more likely it is to have less legacy code to pull forward and therefore to prefer an approach with WebRTC — although this limits its potential markets as not all browsers support the standard equally. We expect WebRTC to initially affect consumer use of real-time capabilities in browsers, and then to affect the enterprise.
Deployment Models
Users have four basic deployment options for Web-conferencing applications:
- SaaS — Web-conferencing software runs on the vendor's (or a partner's) system on a multitenancy basis, and the user accesses the capabilities over the Internet (see Note 1).
- On-premises — Installs software on systems owned and operated by the enterprise.
- Hybrid — Combines the SaaS and on-premises models by allowing segmentation of users across both environments, or failover from on-premises to SaaS (either automated or manual) in high-load conditions or during a disaster.
- Managed services — IT management of the Web-conferencing solution is completely outsourced and managed either directly by the Web-conferencing vendor or by a third-party provider.
September 24, 2014
September 21, 2014
July 16, 2013
Gartner: IT Spend Will Hit $3.7 Trillion In 2013; PC Declines Drag On Growth
IT spend globally — from devices through to data center investments and the services that run on them — it set to reach $3.7 trillion in 2013, but that represents shrinking growth of only 2% on 2012, as more expensive items like PCs and on-premise software continue to get pushed out by less expensive, newer things like lower-cost tablets and cloud services. Gartner, the analyst house publishing these numbers today, projects spend for 2014 to rise to $3.9 trillion, up 4.1%.
Important to note that these figures do not include the vast amounts of money that we as consumers spend online, for example via e-commerce and in apps; nor does it include services like advertising, which are often used to “pay” for content indirectly. “This may change in the future but at the moment it’s excluded,” Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner, tells me.
Be that as it may, these figures, which do include global numbers on IT devices, provide a good barometer for how and where the wider IT world is growing.
The $3.7 trillion in IT spend in 2013 represents a downward revision from where Gartner thought we would be today: compare to last quarter, when Gartner noted growth of 4.1% for this year; that is now more than halved. (You can see comparative projections here.) One of the main reasons for this, Gartner notes, is because of currency fluctuations. In constant currency, growth would still be down compared to 2012, but less so, to 3.5%.
Looking at the table below, one of the bigger categories contributing to the lower forecasts comes from declines in IT devices, which Gartner has revised down to growing only 2.8% this year, or $695 billion, compared to a previous projection of 7.9%.
This is directly linked to trends in what people are buying today for their computing needs: out go bigger and more expensive PCs; in come smaller, and often less expensive, tablets, smartphones — and even smaller devices.
Last week, Gartner noted that although PCs are still the second-largest category of IT devices, shipments of these are dropping fast, while those for mobile phones and tablets continue to climb. In all, there will be 2.4 billion devices shipped in 2013, up 6% on last year, Gartner said.
Today, the analysts spell that out in revenue numbers that tablet revenue will grow by a mammoth 38.9% and mobile devices by 9.3%; but in PCs, “while new devices are set to hit the market in the second half of 2013, they will fail to compensate for the underlying weakness of the traditional PC market,” Gartner notes.
The biggest category of all has been and continues to be telecoms services, which includes things like broadband, telephone services and your mobile bills. These will rise to $1.7 trillion in 2013 — growth of only 0.9%, but at least reversing the declines of -0.7% the year before.
Gartner doesn’t reveal much on what’s going on here, except to point out the fixed broadband is doing better than it had expected and that voice substitution, in which users are switching to cheaper VoIP services or mobile services from traditional landlines, is not taking over as fast among enterprises as consumers. Clearly, one of the bigger trends here is the same one that is driving the devices category: people are going wireless not just for their computing, but for all of their communication needs.
Enterprise software remains one of the smaller categories but growing the strongest: $304 billion will be spent on enterprise this year, a rise of 6.4%. IT services and data centers will each grow only around 2%.
Posted by Ingrid Lunden on TechCrunch:
Ingrid Lunden
July 15, 2013
Forrester: $2.1 Trillion Will Go Into IT Spend In 2013; Apps And The U.S. Lead The Charge
Forrester Research has now released its annual look at the state of IT spend globally, and the analysts project that there will be $2.06 trillion invested across software, hardware, and IT services by enterprises and governments in 2013. Within that, U.S. will be the biggest-spending country by a long shot, and — in a sign of the times — apps will be the single-biggest spending category of all.
Overall, Forrester’s is a more sombre assessment of IT spend compared to Gartner’s, which a couple of weeks ago released its own IT spending estimates (again, not including consumer spend) and put the figure at $3.7 trillion. And it is a more sombre assessment compared to its figures in January, when it noted growth of 5.4% growth for 2013 in local currency terms and 3.3% in U.S. dollars.
As with Gartner, Forrester also puts in the proviso that currency fluctuations are having an impact, specifically because of the strength of the U.S. dollar compared to other currencies. Measured in U.S. dollars, growth has been lowered to 2.3%; in local currencies it’s 4.6%. (Gartner’s figures were 2% in U.S. currency; 3.5% in constant currency.) “The continued recession in Europe and slowing growth in China will offset improvements in the US, Japan, and some emerging markets,” writes analyst Andrew Bartels.
We’re reading through the long report for more insights; for now, here’s a look at some of the bigger takeaways:
Software is eating the world. Forrester’s big-picture look at spending puts software as the biggest general category for investments, at $542 million for 2013. “Software is where most of the big changes in technology are taking place,” writes Bartels. That is to say, while legacy, on-premise investments are “languishing,” those that focus on cloud-based implementations such as SaaS; and “smart computing” in the form of big data analytics and mobile apps are booming — following trends we’ve seen for a while now. Overall, software investments are set to grow 3.3% this year and 6.2% in 2014 — growth rates that he concedes “may not seem impressive [but still] stronger than any other tech category.” A full breakdown of software spend is at the bottom of this post.
Tablets — and Apple — continue to lead the charge in hardware. If you look at the IT spending wheel above, it’s clear that PCs are the single-biggest category for computer equipment, at $134.2 million in 2013. But in fact PCs are a shrinking market. Traditional PCs, Bartels writes, will see “just a 3% rise, despite the launch of Windows 8 operating system.” So what’s growing? Tablets, and specifically the iPad. Forrester projects that sales of tablets to business and government will go up by 36% this year to $21 billion. Again, the big winner here continues to be Apple, taking $14 billion of that this year. Samsung Galaxy and the Surface from Microsoft are “helping to expand the tablet market, without putting much of a dent in the growth of the Apple iPad so far.”
Similarly, Apple, as well as Linux, continue to grow in the traditional PC category against Windows-powered machines, while the rest of the picture is relatively discouraging. There will be $135 billion spent on PCs in 2014, a rise of only $1 billion on 2013, with Windows-based devices down by $7 billion, and Apple Macs and tablets rising by $6 billion. “Elsewhere in the hardware market, spending on storage hardware will be flat, purchases of servers will decline by 1%, and sales of computer peripherals will fall by 3%,” Bartels writes. Indeed, earlier this year Forrester predicted that Apple would sell some $39 billion in hardware over the next two years.
The U.S. is eating the world. The strength of the dollar is one way that the U.S. is impacting global IT spend; the other is the fact that it is very much the biggest consumer of IT, accounting $819 billion in spend this year, according to Forrester’s estimates, rising to $875 million in 2014, inching up to be nearly the size of Western Europe and Asia combined in terms of IT spend.
Impressively for a market its size, of the big three regions, at 5.9% the U.S. also growing the most at the moment, nearly as much as the emerging (and still very small) market of Eastern Europe/Middle East/Africa (at 6.9%). By 2014, Latin America will emerge as the fastest-growing at a a rate of 10.7%. As to the others, Europe appears to be recovering somewhat after a huge, recession-led dip in 2012, spending $487 million in 2013; while Asia has this year taken up the baton as the region most hit by wider economic forces and will spend $492 million on IT across enterprise and government organizations.
Posted by Ingrid Lunden on TechCrunch:
Ingrid Lunden
January 04, 2013
Gartner's 2012 Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways
The secure email gateway market is mature. Buyers should focus on strategic vendors, data loss prevention capability, encryption and better protection from targeted phishing attacks.
Market Definition/Description
The secure email gateway (SEG) market is defined by solutions that provide enterprise message transfer agent (MTA) capabilities, offer protection against inbound and outbound email threats (such as spam, phishing attacks and malware), and satisfy outbound corporate and regulatory policy requirements. SEG solutions can be offered in the form of software or appliances that go on customer premises, hosted solutions that reside in solution providers' data centers, multitenancy software as a service (SaaS) that exists in multiple data centers around the globe, or a combination of these — often referred to as a hybrid deployment. Unified threat management (UTM) devices that combine firewalls with some spam filtering are not included in this market.
Based on our analysis for this report, the total market showed little growth (less than 2%) in 2011. We have adjusted our total market size down from our estimate last year to $1.5 billion. Last year, we anticipated a slight increase in 2011 because of a recovering economy. However, the market growth rate is now at an effective plateau that accompanies a saturated and mature market. Ancillary services, such as data loss prevention (DLP) and encryption, are the main drivers of growth, while traditional spam and virus-filtering services, and other license and subscription revenue, are declining. The increase in suite bundling, especially with hosted mailboxes, will blur the SEG market, making future growth and market size difficult to identify. As more business goes to Microsoft and Google for cloud mailboxes, those vendors effectively increase SEG market share, to the detriment of all other vendors, because hygiene services come bundled with the mailbox. The solution providers in the Leaders quadrant encompass approximately 70% of the market by revenue. Vendors in the Leaders and Challengers quadrants account for approximately 86% of the market.
The increase in acceptance of the SaaS delivery form factor continues, although it, too, is beginning to plateau. We estimate that the SaaS portion of the market grew at around 5% in 2011 and now represents approximately 41% of the market. We continue to be bullish on this form factor and note that nearly all the vendors in this analysis now offer a SaaS-type delivery option. Moreover, approximately 80% of client inquiries ask when it will be appropriate to migrate to the SaaS or cloud-based delivery services. However, we notice that SaaS is more attractive to smaller organizations and very large federated organizations. Midsize organizations (that is, 5,000 to 20,000 seats) don't see significant advantages or economies of scale, and remain concerned about confidentiality.
Magic Quadrant
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Barracuda Networks
Barracuda Networks is a private California-based company that focuses on producing a range of economical, easy-to-use appliances (hardware and virtual) and SaaS solutions aimed squarely at cost-conscious small or midsize businesses (SMBs), as well as educational and government institutions. Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall appliances are shortlist candidates for organizations seeking "set and forget" functionality at a reasonable price.
Strengths
- Barracuda leverages the open-source and white-hat community with its anti-spam technology, along with its own growing security lab. It is one of the few vendors that have a false-positive, false-negative report to monitor spam detection quality. It also offers an Outlook plug-in to report spam and false positives.
- The management interface is designed to be easy to configure — even for nontechnical users — with numerous wizards, context-sensitive help, and clearly visible recommended settings and explanations.
- The SaaS offering provides eight categories of spam.
- Barracuda offers an optional cloud-based prefilter, which filters out obvious spam before final filtering is done on-premises.
- Native basic pull-based encryption and DLP capability are free of charge.
- Barracuda Control Center can manage multiple boxes and centralize configuration, logs and reporting, and comes as a free cloud-based offering or an on-premises appliance.
- Service prices are per box, rather than per user, making Barracuda a significant price leader.
- Barracuda also offers an email archiving solution that has an interface with a consistent look and feel that can also be managed from the same Barracuda Control Center.
Cautions
- Barracuda Labs is still relatively small. It does not offer any other third-party anti-malware engines.
- Advanced features for large enterprise users are missing, such as dashboard customization capacity, a hyperlinked drill-down, a reusable object-oriented policy, granular role-based administration, group-level-only data access, directory synchronization and a group-level policy. Reporting is still quite basic and lacks ad hoc capability to create completely new reports.
- DLP is limited to keyword and regular expression filtering. It is not very flexible. It only includes four predefined DLP dictionaries, and each policy requires its own dictionary. Workflow for compliance officers is limited.
Cisco
Cisco continues to dominate the market for dedicated on-premises solutions for midsize-to-large organizations. Cisco offers four email security solutions: hardware appliances, cloud delivery, managed appliances, and a hybrid combination of appliance and cloud. Cisco also enjoys strategic vendor status with many of its customers and is well-respected in the core network buying centers. Cisco is a good candidate for midsize-to-large enterprise customers looking for best-of-breed functionality.
Strengths
- Cisco has excellent scalability/reliability, an easy-to-use management interface, deep policy control and very granular MTA control capabilities.
- Its Outbreak Filters option provides unique targeted attack protection by scanning suspicious URLs in real time with ScanSafe. It has bulk/marketing email protection. Cisco has made improvements on low-volume spam attacks and IPv6-based reputation and spam.
- Cisco provides content-aware DLP capabilities with numerous predefined policies, dictionaries and identifiers, as well as a strong compliance officer interface. Integration with RSA Enterprise Manager for DLP integration exists between Cisco's solutions and RSA, The Security Division of EMC's enterprise DLP.
- It offers native policy-based email push encryption delivered on box or as a service with message recall, read receipt and message expiration, proprietary desktop to desktop encryption capabilities, support for BlackBerry, iOS and Android platforms, and large file attachment handling.
- Cisco Email Security benefits from Cisco's installed base of network security appliances and the Cisco Cloud Web Security (formerly ScanSafe) to collect a massive amount of Internet traffic information to spot new malware and spam trends. Cisco's broad array of network security components (firewalls, intrusion prevention systems [IPSs], secure Web gateways [SWGs] and routers) makes it a strategic vendor for organizations looking to consolidate buying around fewer security vendors.
Cautions
- Cisco's focus on the needs of large enterprises doesn't always scale down well for SMBs. The user interface can be confusing and nonintuitive for less experienced operators.
- Cisco's hosted email offering only has four data centers in the U.S. and Europe so far.
- The Cisco Email Security management interface would benefit from a more flexible custom dashboard, although the reporting interface has dashboardlike functionality.
- Cisco solutions carry a very high list price relative to the market. Buyers must negotiate effectively to gain competitive pricing. The hosted service is competitive for basic inbound protection, but DLP and encryption come at premium costs.
- Cisco is not likely to offer a vertically integrated email stack (for example, security, archive, disaster recovery and hosted exchange).
- The Hybrid solution requires separate management interfaces.
- Cisco will no longer sell the PostX encryption appliance, which eliminates pull functionality and support for Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and Secure Multipurpose Internet Messaging Extensions (S/MIME); however, it continues to support on-box push encryption. The former PostX functionality will continue to be available via Cisco partner Totemo.
Clearswift
Clearswift has an established presence in the email protection market primarily in the U.K., Europe and Asia/Pacific. It has also branched out to the SWG market. In November 2011, Clearswift was the subject of a management buyout backed by Lyceum Capital. Clearswift offers a bare metal software or VMware/Hyper-V solution. The combination of SWG and SEG, and the provision of basic DLP capabilities across both channels, make it a reasonable shortlist candidate for buyers looking for both solutions from the same vendor.
Strengths
- The Web-based management interface provides centralized management, dashboards, and reporting for the Web and email products; a centralized reporting engine; and the content scanning engine. It is easy to use for nontechnical users, and it has a lot of context-sensitive recommendations and help functions.
- The proprietary Clearswift DLP engine provides fast scanning of more than 150 file formats. It contains features to protect against denial-of-service attacks, and provides a selection of prebuilt patterns for common data types (PCI/PII), as well as common Boolean and proximity operators.
- Users can manage their quarantine from any browser or via an iPhone/iPad interface.
- Clearswift exploits Commtouch for a portion of its anti-spam capability and upgraded to the most recent engine.
- The solution includes a "bulk email" category, which is useful for reducing nuisance email.
- The ImageLogic pornographic and registered image detection engine is an extra utility service for organizations with this need.
- On-box encryption with support for S/MIME, PGP and password-protected email encryption with a built-in certificate store was recently improved with automatic certificate and key extraction and lookup. The Echoworx partnership provides enhanced encryption capabilities via a Web portal ("pull") or mailbox ("push").
Cautions
- Clearswift is recovering its growth due to a focus on the core email and Web gateway business and improving customer support; however, its market and mind share are very low in a rapidly maturing market. It is late to deliver industry-leading features and functionality. It does not directly offer a SaaS-based delivery model or vertical products, such as email archiving. As buyers increasingly look for more strategic integrated vendors, Clearswift may have a difficult time standing out in a crowded market.
- Although the interface is easy to use for nontechnical users, it is limited in detail for more technical enterprise users.
- Advanced encryption provided by Echoworx is not integrated into the management interface. It lacks any control or visibility of sent messages, and it lacks self-service configuration of the encryption experience.
- DLP enhancements are needed in the ability to describe sensitive content beyond regular expressions, along with support for more advanced detection techniques, such as partial document matching. Policy management, workflow reporting and event management are rudimentary.
- Clearswift's list prices are high relative to close competitors and SaaS services.
Dell
Dell acquired SonicWALL and now offers a broad suite of network security solutions in the Dell SonicWALL family, including firewalls, virtual private networks, backup and a range of SEGs. It offers several SEG form factors, including hardware appliances, software and VMware versions, and hosted versions. It also offers a subset of SEG functionality delivered as SaaS prefilters for its UTM customers. Dell is a candidate for shortlist inclusion primarily for existing Dell SonicWALL firewall customers.
Strengths
- Dell is one of the largest resellers of Microsoft Exchange solutions. The acquisition of SonicWALL enables Dell to sell a more integrated email solution stack.
- Dell SonicWALL has its own malware research team developing new spam signatures and detection techniques, which leverage data from its installed base of appliances. The solution leverages contact databases and communication partners to lower false positives.
- The management interface is localized in a number of languages and is easy to use. It has multitenancy support, and reporting is adequate for most organizations' needs.
- The solution includes some basic content-aware functionality for a DLP policy, with two prebuilt dictionaries and a number of predefined number identifiers, including Social Security number (SSN), credit card, phone and others.
- Dell SonicWALL Hosted Email Security was recently launched.
Cautions
- It is difficult for any company to compete in many markets and across company segments — ranging from large enterprises to small offices — while providing market-leading features in each market segment. Dell SonicWALL does not provide any market-leading SEG functionality. Only a small percentage of its revenue is email-security-related. Its market and mind share are minimal and were not growing prior to the acquisition.
- Dell SonicWALL still does not provide any native encryption, except for Transport Layer Security (TLS), and does not allow TLS rules per domain. It has no real integration with dedicated third-party encryption solutions.
- DLP functionality is basic and supports only regular expression matching. It does not include any predefined policy, and event management is rudimentary.
Fortinet
Fortinet is a public company with a broad geographical market presence that offers a broad array of UTM and dedicated appliances for all organization sizes. It offers an array of anti-spam technology in various forms from client to UTM. This analysis, however, focuses on the dedicated SEG FortiMail appliances. FortiMail is a shortlist candidate for existing Fortinet customers or those looking for a firewall and SEG solution from the same vendor.
Strengths
- The management interface is similar to other Fortinet products. FortiManager can manage up to 40 Fortinet devices, and FortiAnalyzer provides centralized log storage dashboards and reporting.
- FortiMail appliances benefit from high-availability and scalability features, such as native clustering, load balancing and high-throughput appliances.
- FortiMail includes some basic DLP capability with regular expression matching via preconfigured and user-definable dictionary profiles.
- Identity-based push and pull encryption is included free of charge in the standard feature set.
- Fortinet offers attractive price-to-performance value, with appliance-based, rather than user-based, service pricing.
- Fortinet provides on-box or off-box policy-based message archiving that is fully indexed and available from the FortiMail management interface.
Cautions
- It is difficult for any company to compete in many markets and across many company segments, ranging from carriers to the small office/home office market, and to provide market leading features in each market segment. Fortinet is no exception. The company is much better known for its firewall/UTM market presence, and only a small percentage of its revenue is related to email security. In addition, it is not growing its market share in a rapidly maturing market.
- The administration interface is not really user friendly and would benefit from enhanced search capability. The FortiAnalyzer component is required for in-depth, per-domain report and log access across multiple logs in a single interface. However, this component costs extra.
- Fortinet uses its own antivirus technology, and it does not have a big research organization, especially when compared with the leaders in this report or their partners. The addition of an optional third-party antivirus engine would be an improvement.
- Fortinet does not offer a hosted or managed service, although some service providers use Fortinet's infrastructure to deliver services to customers.
- DLP functionality is relatively basic and lacks good compliance workflow, notifications, partial document matching, delegated administration and hierarchical policies. DLP notifications employ static messages but lack the ability to dynamically modify the content.
Google remains one of the market and mind share leaders in the SaaS SEG market; however, its growth has been low because of lackluster innovation and feature development, and meager support. In August 2012, Google announced the gradual migration of all existing Postini customers to the Google Apps infrastructure and management console. Essentially, this means that existing Postini and future Google customers' email will be routed to a store-and-forward Gmail inbox for message filtering and then to the corporate mailbox. All administration will now be performed in the Google Apps management interface, making Google a particularly good choice for organizations considering future enterprise Gmail and other Google SaaS offerings.
Strengths
- Google Postini customers will have the same spam-filtering mechanism as Google's millions of consumer and enterprise Gmail customers. This system relies partly on email user feedback about spam messages. Users will be able to easily submit false positives and false negatives using "is-spam" or "is-not-spam" plug-ins to refine the accuracy of the filters. For virus blocking, Gmail blocks all executables and has extensive malicious URL data from its primary search business.
- The Google Apps management interface and supporting infrastructure and services are foundational to Google's enterprise aspirations and make up the central management platform for enterprise Gmail and its enterprise Apps suite. This platform has been getting development attention that was lacking for Postini. For example, the admin console is in 27 languages versus a single language for Postini, and the policy creation engine is more flexible and modular and includes a richer set of optional rules and disposition actions.
- Gmail offers MAPI integration enabling a local Outlook spam quarantine, in addition to planned email quarantine digest emails and the native Gmail inbox spam quarantine.
- Because Google is sending inbound email to a Gmail inbox, it can become a backup email infrastructure in outages for reading inbound messages and sending messages. This also makes adopting an enterprise Gmail solution very simple, no doubt a significant Google motivator for this transition.
- Gmail includes a rich set of purpose-built tools for objectionable content.
- Gmail uses DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to validate senders.
- Google licenses ZixCorp's service for encryption.
- Google's price is typically very good compared with comparable services, especially for broad bundles of related services.
Cautions
- The migration to the Gmail infrastructure eliminates a few features that were available to Postini customers. Most notably, email processing will move from in-memory-only processing to a more proxylike, store-and-forward architecture; Google will not guarantee in-geography processing, although it is making strides to comply with EU regulations; and Gmail does not offer spam categories, and industry heuristics rules will be eliminated.
- Gmail does not offer the same SLAs as Postini services or competitors. Gmail offers a 99.9% uptime SLA; however, there are no spam-filtering or virus-specific SLAs.
- At "launch," Google will not offer any synchronization capabilities that would keep the primary mail system updated with email sent from the Gmail inbox during outages.
- The Google/Postini service ranked very low in customer satisfaction in our customer reference survey. The move to a more strategic Google Apps platform may help alleviate some customer frustration, but the migration will likely introduce some short-term issues.
- Although Google offers regular expressions and dictionary policy constructs for basic DLP functionality, it lacks any preconfigured policy dictionaries and number formats for common use cases. The quarantine is not specific to the DLP task, and it offers no real features to ease compliance management workflow.
- Licensed encryption from ZixCorp does not provide any integrated management capability.
- Google does not offer many security assurances that are commonly offered by other providers, and it does not allow for site visits. It does, however, provide SSAE 16 audits and ISO 27001 certification, which serve as third-party attestation and certification.
McAfee
McAfee, which is a subsidiary of Intel, has a broad range of endpoint and network security products. McAfee has consolidated its two on-premises gateway solutions in its latest version 7.x, which is a free version upgrade that is supported on hardware appliances that are less than three years old. It also offers blade server appliances, virtual versions, and SaaS-based SEG, archiving and disaster recovery services.
Strengths
- McAfee's respected threat research team consolidates message, network, Web and file reputation data into its Global Threat Intelligence (GTI) system for real-time analysis of emerging threats.
- The Web-based management interface has customization of dashboard elements for each administrator, consolidated message queues and easy-to-understand disposition information.
- Its native DLP capability is strong and leverages the capabilities of its stand-alone enterprise-class, content-aware DLP offering. McAfee provides numerous predefined policies and dictionaries as part of the base product, and it supports self-defined content for policy creation. The solution supports delegated administration for distinct event viewing, along with the separation of duties.
- Basic encryption methods (TLS, S/MIME and PGP gateway encryption) are supported, along with push (secure envelope) encryption. It also supports the secure transfer of arbitrarily large files via its encrypted email pull capability.
- The SaaS offering provides a simple, clean, Web-based interface that is very easy to use for managing Web and email traffic. It is hosted in seven geographies (U.S., China/Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, England and the Netherlands). The service can lock message traffic to a specific geography to avoid processing traffic in foreign legal environments. The DLP capability is included in the base package, and policy-based pull/push email encryption is an optional add-on. McAfee customers can switch between solutions without any additional charge.
Cautions
- McAfee has not expanded its market share in the enterprise SEG market since the Secure Computing acquisition, and it does not show up on Gartner client shortlists or competitive large enterprise deals as often as we would expect, given McAfee's channel reach. We believe that the McAfee network security portfolio may be less well-aligned with Intel's priorities.
- The McAfee and IronMail platforms have been consolidated in v.7, which is the first major new release in three years. The development focus of v.7 left some customers with outstanding issues on the previous version. We anticipate a more rapid release schedule; however, for former CipherTrust customers, it has been a long road.
- DLP integration across products is not fully complete. The email products share the same DLP engine, but content is not synchronized across products — meaning changes in one content list will not be replicated.
- Several Gartner clients and some reference customers have expressed concern about McAfee support capabilities. McAfee scored very low in customer satisfaction in our reference customer survey.
Microsoft
Microsoft offers two complementary email security solutions. Its flagship product is Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE), which is a SaaS-based solution. Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server (FPE) is a software solution that is run on Exchange. FOPE is a good shortlist inclusion, especially for Microsoft-centric customers that purchase premium licensing. It is a default choice for organizations considering Microsoft's Exchange Online or the Office 365 suite. Enterprise buyers should consider FPE primarily as an additional layer of antivirus protection for the Exchange message store and for internal federated Exchange filtering, rather than as a stand-alone SEG solution. Microsoft's dominance in the email market makes it a strategic provider of SEG solutions.
Strengths
- FOPE mirrors email across multiple data centers for redundancy. Mail-processing data centers are located in the U.S. and Europe. Microsoft supports in-geography mail processing for its U.S. customers.
- Exchange, Outlook, and the FOPE and Exchange Hosted Encryption (EHE) network all support TLS, S/MIME and PGP. FOPE also offers a Hosted Encryption solution that is based on Voltage Security technology. FOPE supports large file attachment transfer up to 150MB.
- Forefront Protection Server Management Console 2010 (FPSMC) provides multiserver management for FPE 2010 and integrates with the FOPE Administration Center.
- The Junk E-Mail Outlook plug-in enables users to directly report junk email to Microsoft for analysis.
- FPE is useful on an Exchange hub for internal virus filtering.
- Microsoft's email security solutions are part of the enterprise client access license (CAL), the Exchange Enterprise CAL and the Forefront Protection Suite. Users should check their license entitlements before they consider alternatives.
- Microsoft is capable of tighter integration of SEG functions with Exchange/Outlook than competitors. Gartner anticipates significant improvements in DLP and encryption capabilities that are tightly integrated with the Outlook client, as well as integrated management of FOPE/FPE and Exchange in Microsoft's next version of Exchange/Outlook (which Gartner estimates will be available in early 2013).
Cautions
- Microsoft is not on the leading edge of functionality in this market and is very slow to offer major new improvements.
- Microsoft only has data centers in the U.S. and the EU, and in-geography-only routing is only available in the U.S.
- Buyers that have not standardized on Active Directory require Forefront Identity Manager to consolidate directories in a single addressable entity for synchronization with the service.
- The DLP capability is very limited in the current release. It does not provide extensive workflow or predeveloped policies and notifications. The licensed encryption solution is not integrated into the management console and lacks self-service configuration of the encryption experience and significant control or visibility of sent messages.
- Policy changes take some time to propagate through the network, which lacks a feedback loop to certify that the changes have been implemented.
- The FOPE spam detection SLA at 98% is lower than the industry norm of 99%.
Mimecast
Mimecast is a U.K.-based dedicated email security vendor that is expanding into North America. It offers a range of SaaS-based email security services, including SEG, archiving/e-discovery and disaster recovery. Mimecast is a good fit for organizations looking for a full suite of services, and those looking to provide end users with a set of email security utilities.
Strengths
- Mimecast provides a multitenant SaaS email infrastructure with simple administration across the range of email security services. It is hosted in 10 data centers in the U.S., the U.K., South Africa and the Channel Islands.
- It provides a set of email utilities for end users via its Outlook plug-in, making it seamless for users to manage their email without leaving Outlook. This integration allows users to specify how messages are handled at the gateway by using message actions that let users choose encryption types, what stationary to apply, document conversion options, and large file attachment handling. Archive, search and disaster recovery are also integrated into Outlook, so the end user has only one interface for all tasks.
- DLP and encryption capabilities are available at an additional cost and are adequate for most compliance tasks. DLP includes attached file content analysis and comes with numerous dictionaries available for import. Encryption is Web pull-based, or TLS and can be invoked by end users via the Outlook plug-in or policy.
- Message tracing is enhanced by a rolling archive that enables administrators to search on any part of an email, including the body.
Cautions
- Although it is growing faster than the market, Mimecast is one of the smallest vendors in this analysis, and it has very low mind share and market share. As buyers increasingly look for more-strategic integrated vendors, Mimecast will have a difficult time standing out in a crowded market.
- Mimecast only has a small malware/spam research team. It is dependent on partners for a portion of its spam and malware detection capability.
- List pricing for basic SEG services at lower volumes (less than 501 seats) is above average. DLP, encryption and setup costs are extra.
- DLP capability could be improved with embedded dictionaries and policies that are updated by Mimecast, rather than downloadable. It does not support partial hashes or referenced data (database), and it can't import or export rules or events to enterprise DLP solutions.
- Reference customers cited reporting, multiple account administration and simpler administration as areas that could be improved.
Proofpoint
Proofpoint continues to lead the market with innovative features and a singular focus on email security issues — resulting in one of the highest growth rates in this market. In addition to SEG capabilities, the company offers archiving, document discovery/governance, large file transfer and mailbox hosting. Proofpoint's flagship email security solution (Proofpoint Enterprise) is available as a hosted service; as on-premises appliances, virtual (VMware) appliances and software; or as a hybrid combination of these versions. Proofpoint is a very good candidate for organizations looking for a full range of best-of-breed SEG functionality in supported geographies.
Strengths
- Spam and malware accuracy has always been a consistent strength of Proofpoint, and the company is one of the few that publicly reports its anti-spam effectiveness (see www.proofpoint.com/products/livespamstats.php). Proofpoint provides spam classifiers (adult, bulk mail, phish and suspected spam) to enable more granular policy. The company continues to invest in new techniques for spam and spear phishing detection, including a new Targeted Attack Protection service to detect and report on targeted attack activity.
- Its recently updated Web-based management interface continues to be one of the best, with numerous innovations and unique features. We particularly like the completely customizable dashboards for each administrator.
- Proofpoint offers integrated, push policy-based encryption that incorporates the features traditionally associated with pull offerings, and is optimized for mobile devices. The solution also supports TLS, S/MIME and PGP secure email delivery.
- DLP features are very strong and include numerous prebuilt policies, dictionaries, number identifiers and integrated policy-based encryption. Policy development is object-oriented and similar across spam and DLP. The DLP quarantine is very sophisticated for a channel solution, and it includes highlighted policy violations and the ability to add comments to incidents. DLP policy can be enforced on Web traffic via a dedicated network sniffer or Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP) integration with a proxy server.
- SaaS data centers are located in the U.S., Canada, Germany and the Netherlands.
Cautions
- Proofpoint's dedicated focus on email is both a strength and a weakness. Although it continues to define best-of-breed functionality, in a rapidly maturing market, best-of-breed often becomes overkill to some customers. Concurrently, numerous enterprise buyers are looking for opportunities to consolidate product purchases around fewer, more strategic vendors.
- Despite good growth rates, Proofpoint continues to have a smaller market and mind share, especially outside North America.
- Proofpoint is a poor fit for smaller organizations that do not require advanced controls due to corporate focus and high prices.
- The archiving service does not yet have a shared management interface with the hosted or on-premises solutions, and customers commented that the hybrid experience should be more seamless.
- Despite improvements in reporting, it still lacks a completely ad hoc reporting capability. Several customers commented on the complexity of the upgrade process.
Sophos
Sophos has been in the SEG market since 2003 and recently entered the UTM market with the acquisition of Astaro. It has a relentless focus on simplifying the management of its solutions. Its current flagship solution, the Sophos Email Appliance, is offered as hardware and virtual appliances. The company also offers PureMessage software versions for Unix, Exchange and Lotus. Sophos is a shortlist candidate for SMBs and larger enterprises looking for low-administration appliance-based solutions.
Strengths
- The management interface is very easy to use for a nontechnical user. Dashboards are very graphical and allow for some level of linked drill-down into log or reporting data. We particularly like the included appliance-monitoring service and authorized remote access, which allows Sophos to proactively monitor box health and provide optional remote assistance when needed. Software version updates and database updates are all pushed to the appliances, which significantly reduces administration time and allows for more incremental updates.
- Spam and malware detection technology includes bulk email detection.
- DLP and encryption are included with the license. Sophos provides a very rich set of DLP dictionaries, lexicons and compliance policies, which are continuously updated by SophosLabs.
- Secure PDF Exchange (SPX) encryption functionality provides a very easy-to-use, push-based model that captures email content and converts it to a password-protected PDF file attached to the original email.
- Sophos gets very high marks for customer service and support.
Cautions
- Despite a long presence in the market, Sophos has minimal mind share or market share.
- Sophos' focus on providing simple-to-manage appliances can be limiting for larger organizations. Advanced enterprise-class features, such as dashboard customization, log data visibility restrictions, and advanced reporting, are all missing or weak. It does not allow for per-user sending limits. Sophos still does not support DKIM or SPF, which are important standards for detecting spoofed messages.
- DLP workflow is weak compared with the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. There is no compliance officer role or a specific quarantine to enable compliance-related workflow, such as building cases, annotating events or custom actions for email. Notifications for policy compliance are created for each event, rather than created as objects and referenced in policy.
- Although Sophos includes its SEG product with several suites, it does not yet provide a common interface to manage and monitor multiple products.
- Sophos does not offer a SaaS-based delivery option.
Symantec
Symantec is one of the largest SEG vendors by market share and continues to grow faster than the market. It has one of the broadest ranges of mature SEG offerings, including hardware appliances, SaaS, virtual appliances (VMware), and software for Exchange and Domino. Symantec also offers archiving and e-discovery solutions and disaster recovery email services. Continuous improvements in the Symantec Messaging Gateway (SMG) and the Symantec.cloud SaaS service make Symantec a good candidate for most organizations.
Strengths
- Symantec has a very large and sophisticated malware research team that has access to a significant amount of telemetry data from its very large consumer, Internet service provider, SMB and enterprise customer base.
- The vendor has spam categories for marketing and newsletters to quarantine nuisance email. Recently, it made improvements in non-English spam, including Chinese image spam.
- The submission process for false positives/negatives is much improved. It now includes a full cycle reporting capability that highlights resulting changes and enables the creation of custom rule sets based on submitted samples.
- Symantec offers complex content-filtering policy constructs, such as negative-filtering conditions, multiple simultaneous content-filtering policies and early exit branches to stop further processing.
- SMG is offered as part of an endpoint and SWG package deal that is very attractively priced.
- Symantec is a leader in the enterprise DLP market, and leverages the same content inspection engine and predefined content in its SEG solution. Recently, it improved the synchronization of quarantine management, incident status and the workflow with the enterprise DLP solution.
- Symantec.cloud offers very strong SLAs, and it is hosted in 18 data centers.
- Both solutions get high marks from customers for support and services, and ease of use.
- Symantec offers PGP encryption capability in addition to a partnership with ZixCorp or Echoworx.
Cautions
- Symantec management does not integrate across on-premises and service offerings for hybrid deployments or offer pricing that allows users to swap between deployment types.
- DLP integration is improving for workflow but not policy and content synchronization. The Symantec.cloud DLP solution lacks granular policy options.
- The licensed encryption solutions are not integrated into the management console and lack self-service configuration of the encryption experience and significant control or visibility of sent messages.
- The SMG management console could be improved with better reporting, an email disposition summary that provides clear indicators of why email is quarantined, per-user sending limits and less-dense DLP policy configuration.
Trend Micro
Trend Micro is a major provider of anti-malware protection solutions and was an early entrant in the SEG market. Its current InterScan Messaging Security Suite (IMSS) is offered on a broad range of delivery form factors, including software (Windows, Linux, Solaris and Exchange), virtual appliances (VMware), software appliance for installation on any bare metal hardware, and a SaaS and hybrid offering. Recent initiatives demonstrate a renewed SEG focus. Trend Micro remains a shortlist candidate for most organizations.
Strengths
- Trend Micro has a large and well-respected malware and spam research team.
- IMSSs can perform live queries against the cloud-based database (Smart Protection Network) to reduce threat distribution lag time.
- The new optional Dynamic Threat Analysis System (DTAS) inspects suspect files in a sandbox to provide more detailed inspection and forensic information.
- Software and virtual versions come with an optional hybrid deployment option, which provides reputation and course content filtering, with integrated on-premises quarantine, management and reporting.
- Trend Micro offers a widget-based graphical management interface that each administrator can customize with predefined widgets.
- Native push-based encryption encapsulates email content in an encrypted password-protected attachment that can be viewed by any JavaScript-enabled browser. Key management is in the cloud data center operated by Trend Micro.
- Trend Micro's DLP module was recently integrated with its Control Manager, enabling DLP management across its endpoint, Web and email solutions. Trend Micro also expanded the number of predefined DLP content.
Cautions
- Although Trend Micro had an early presence in this market, its market share has been relatively flat, and it has failed to gain mind and market share — keeping it out of the Leaders quadrant.
- Reference customers requested more granular reporting and better centralized management for multiple sites, simpler updating, and simpler and more intuitive configuration.
- The SaaS offering is focused on SMBs. It does not offer archiving, mailbox hosting or disaster recovery/continuity services. Although many of the component parts of the service are the same as the on-premises solution, the management interface is different.
- Corporate and user allow lists are not synchronized between the SaaS-based prefilter and the enterprise solution, although they can be imported and exported.
- Native IMSS workflow capabilities are weak without integration with Trend Micro's Control Manager.
- The offline sandbox DTAS is very new and costs extra.
Trustwave
In March 2012, Trustwave acquired M86 Security. Based in Illinois, Trustwave is a large and rapidly growing service provider that focuses primarily on PCI compliance requirements. It has accumulated a number of security products, including UTM firewalls for application security and compliance products. In addition, Trustwave offers a large number of managed services. Trustwave also offers a cloud solution that is branded and sold by service providers and channel partners.
Strengths
- The Windows-based management interface is capable and offers some advanced features, such as task shortcuts and support for batch file workflow commands. Role-based and multitenant management capability is a core strength.
- Its Blended Threats Module uses URL rewriting to analyze potentially malicious URLs at the time of access using the SWG service. By default, it uses an automatically updated whitelist of communication recipients and connecting IP addresses to reduce false positives.
- Antivirus is provided as an option by Kaspersky, Sophos, McAfee or Norman.
- Existing DLP capabilities, which include basic regular expression matching and some predeveloped policies, dictionaries and number formats, will be augmented by Trustwave's enterprise DLP solutions.
Cautions
- M86 was struggling to gain broad brand recognition and sales momentum in the SEG market. The Trustwave acquisition is not likely to increase the level of product investment or momentum outside Trustwave's managed security service provider clients. Trustwave has very little channel support outside the PCI and payment processing verticals.
- The solution has three management interfaces with little integration. There are limited dashboard elements and no hyperlinked drill-downs into reports. The policy interface is a tired-looking Windows application with pop-up, Windows-style workflow.
- DLP capabilities are limited to a keyword analysis and do not include many predefined policies, dictionaries or lexicons, nor do they offer much workflow support for compliance officers.
- On-box encryption is limited to TLS, and advanced encryption provided by ZixCorp is not integrated into the management interface. Thus, it lacks any control or visibility of sent messages, and it lacks self-service configuration of the encryption experience.
- The SaaS service is limited to the New Zealand and Australian markets, and list pricing is well above global averages.
WatchGuard
WatchGuard, which is better known for its multifunction firewalls, also offers an appliance-based combined email and Web gateway called Extensible Content Security (XCS). WatchGuard's primary user base is SMBs. However, the XCS SEG solution has a good mix of midsize and large North American enterprise customers. WatchGuard XCS is a good shortlist option for existing WatchGuard customers.
Strengths
- XCS provides SEG and SWG functionality in the same appliance (hardware or virtual version), and relevant policies can be set for both channels in the same management interface. The management interface was improved with more wizards to simplify deployment and management, a frequent task screen, and improved message tracking and reporting.
- XCS provides native clustering that creates a virtual machine mail queue. The message queue is mirrored across devices in clustered deployments for high availability.
- The DLP policy is shared across Web and email traffic, and includes financial and medical term dictionaries, and predefined number formats for common data types, such as credit cards and SSNs.
Cautions
- WatchGuard's mind share and market share remain very small, and it is not growing. It is difficult for any company to compete in many markets and across many company segments, and to provide market-leading features in each market segment. The company is much better known for its firewall/UTM market presence, and only a small percentage of its revenue is related to email security. It is not growing its market share in a rapidly maturing market.
- The management dashboard could be improved with a customization capability, role-specific views and more-hyperlinked drill-down capabilities into relevant reports. Role-based administration could be improved with reusable role definitions, more options for role policies and the ability to limit an administrator's log data access to just the groups managed.
- Its DLP policy could be improved with more predeveloped dictionaries and policies for common regulations, as well as better quarantine management options for compliance officers and broader content support.
- Advanced encryption provided by Voltage is not integrated into the management interface. Thus, it lacks any control or visibility of sent messages and self-service configuration of the encryption experience.
- WatchGuard does not have SaaS offerings.
Websense
Websense offers a number of delivery options: Cloud Email Security (CES), which is a SaaS offering; Websense Email Security (WES), which is an on-premises software solution; and the Websense Email Security Gateway Anywhere (ESGA) hybrid solution, which combines a prefilter SaaS with an on-premises appliance-based solution. It also offers a similar set of service with SWG functionality. However, Websense's primary focus is on the flagship Triton solution, which combines email, Web and data security as part of a single, unified content security solution. Websense is an excellent candidate solution for buyers looking for integrated SWG and SEG functionality, and advanced DLP capability.
Strengths
- All the various Websense solutions are tied together with the Triton management interface and reporting engine, which has numerous advanced features, including bulk email detection, malicious URL analyses at the time of access, static code analysis of suspicious documents and drip DLP protection to detect data leaked in smaller chunks.
- Websense has 15 data centers located in 11 countries.
- Websense offers very strong DLP capabilities for this market. It includes numerous predefined DLP content dictionaries in 12 languages, plus additional compliance templates for items such as PCI DSS, state data privacy laws, HIPAA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
- Native encryption provides TLS, as well as basic push and pull functions.
- Websense recently added an archival service (via an OEM partner) and a disaster recovery/business continuity service that provides an Outlook Web Access-type view into messages queued, with the service and outbound email functionality.
- It is one of the few solutions in this report that enables administrators to view a false-negative and false-positive report in the dashboard.
Cautions
- Websense has a long history in the Web security market, but its mind share and market share in the SEG market are comparatively low. However, Websense is showing good growth in the enterprise market among customers looking for converged SEG, SWG and DLP.
- The Triton management interface can be very complex and involve numerous steps to create policies. The dashboards have only limited customization, and there is no ad hoc reporting capability. CES message search is not quite in real time and could experience as much as a five-minute delay.
- Advanced encryption provided by Voltage is not integrated into the Triton management interface. Thus, it lacks any control or visibility of sent messages and self-service configuration of the encryption experience.
- Off-box SQL log storage is recommended for larger deployments of on-premises solutions.
- Without the hybrid Triton solution, there are management and configuration differences between the capability of the SaaS offering and the on-premises appliance solution. For example, SaaS-based DLP and reporting capabilities are not as complete as the on-premises offering.
Vendors Added or Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor.
Added
Mimecast reached our inclusion criteria minimum customer threshold and recently unbundled its suite to allow customers to buy SEG-only services. Dell acquired SonicWALL, and Trustwave acquired M86 Security. These solutions now appear under the new names.
Dropped
Webroot is refocusing the company on its endpoint protection solutions and has closed its SaaS email services to any future business. It is in the process of helping customers migrate to other providers. Dell acquired SonicWALL, and Trustwave acquired M86 Security. These solutions now appear under the new names.
Other Vendors
This Magic Quadrant is not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of every vendor in this market, but rather a focused analysis of solutions that are most interesting to the majority of our clients. Other vendors were not included in this analysis because they do not fit the technical inclusion criteria. Sendmail is one that has a respectable large enterprise presence but takes a unique approach by offering a platform that enables enterprises to plug in various email security applications from other vendors. This approach enables enterprises to build their own solutions from component vendors, while offering an overall management framework and underlying scalable messaging transfer agent. Vendors such as Spamina, Axway, eleven, and AppRiver focus on a particular geographic or vertical market niche.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
- The solution must have its own proprietary capabilities to block or filter unwanted email traffic.
- Supplementing the solution with third-party technology is acceptable.
- The solution must provide email virus scanning via its own or a third-party antivirus engine.
- The solution must provide basic intrusion prevention.
- The solution must offer email encryption functionality beyond TLS on its own or via a third-party relationship.
- The solution must offer the ability to scan outbound email according to a set of basic vendor-supplied dictionaries and common identifiers (for example, SSN, credit card, bank account and routing numbers).
- Vendors must have at least 2,000 direct (not via OEM) enterprise customers in production for their email security boundary products.
- Multifunction firewalls (also known as UTM devices) are outside the scope of this analysis. These devices are traditional network firewalls that also combine numerous network security technologies — such as anti-spam, antivirus, network IPS and URL filtering — into a single box. Multifunction firewalls are compelling for the SMB and branch office markets. However, in most circumstances, enterprise buyers do not consider multifunction firewalls as replacements for SEGs.
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Vertical positioning on the Ability to Execute axis was determined by evaluating the following factors:
- Overall viability was given a heavy weighting, because this is a mature and saturated market. Overall viability was considered, not only in terms of the overall company revenue, channel reach, management team and resources of the vendor, but also in terms of the importance of the email security unit at each company.
- Sales execution/pricing scores reflected a comparison of pricing relative to the market.
- Market responsiveness and track record measured the speed in which the vendor has spotted a market shift and produced a product that potential customers are looking for, as well as the size of the vendor's installed base relative to the amount of time the product has been on the market. This weighting takes into account a vendor's performance over time, but performance during the past 18 months was evaluated most significantly.
- Customer experience measured the quality of the customer experience based on reference calls and Gartner client teleconferences. We incorporated research and reference call data on support responsiveness and timeliness, quality of releases and patches, and general experiences when installing and managing the product and service on a day-to-day basis.
- The operations score reflects the corporate resources (in other words, management, business facilities, threat research, and support and distribution infrastructure) that the SEG business unit can draw on to improve product functionality, marketing and sales. We also took into consideration the focus and transitions of the SEG teams in acquired companies.
Source: Gartner (August 2012)
Completeness of Vision
The Completeness of Vision axis captures the technical quality and breadth of the product, and the vendor's organizational characteristics that will lead to higher product satisfaction among midsize to large enterprise customers, such as how well the vendor understands this market, its history of innovation and its geographic presence. In market understanding, we ranked vendors on the strength of their commitment to this market in the form of strong product management, their vision for this market and the degree to which their road maps reflect a solid commitment of resources to achieve that vision.
We heavily weighted the product features of the vendors' flagship solutions in the Completeness of Vision criteria. Product features that Gartner deemed the most important were:
- Anti-spam/phishing effectiveness and investment in malware research, especially targeted attack detection
- Management and reporting functionality
- DLP capabilities
- Encryption capabilities
- Delivery form factor options
Other functionality or solutions relevant to the buyer in the target market of the supplier, such as archiving, disaster recovery and file transfer, were also taken into account.
Source: Gartner (August 2012)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders are performing well, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership positions in the market. Companies in this quadrant offer a comprehensive and proficient range of email security functionality, and show evidence of superior vision and execution for current and anticipated customer requirements. Leaders typically have a relatively high market share and/or strong revenue growth, own a good portion of their threat or content-filtering capabilities, and demonstrate positive customer feedback for anti-spam efficacy and related service and support.
Challengers
Challengers execute well, but they have a less defined view of market direction. Therefore, they may not be aggressive in preparing for the future. Companies in this quadrant typically have strong execution capabilities, evidenced by financial resources, and a significant sales and brand presence garnered from the company as a whole or other factors. However, Challengers have not demonstrated as rich a capability or track record for their email security product portfolios as vendors in the Leaders quadrant.
Visionaries
Visionaries have a clear vision of market direction and are focused on preparing for that, but they may be challenged to execute against that vision because of undercapitalization, market presence, experience, size, scope and so forth.
Niche Players
Niche Players focus on a particular segment of the client base, as defined by characteristics such as a specific geographic delivery capability or dedication to a more limited product set. Their ability to outperform or be innovative may be affected by this narrow focus. Vendors in this quadrant may have a small installed base or may be limited, according to Gartner's criteria, by a number of factors. These factors may include limited investment or capability to provide email security threat detection organically, a geographically limited footprint or other inhibitors to providing a broader set of capabilities to enterprises now and during the 12-month planning horizon. Inclusion in this quadrant does not reflect negatively on the vendors' value in the more narrowly focused market they service.
Context
- The total market revenue is peaking as it reaches saturation and primary feature maturity. Buyers should focus on more-strategic vendors that will continue to accumulate market share.
- Consider incumbent cloud-based email platforms that will typically offer good enough spam and malware protection for most organizations.
- SaaS solution are very attractive to smaller organizations (less than 2,000 seats) that tend to have lower customization requirements, fewer resources to manage solutions and larger organizations that favor outsourcing.
- Pay careful attention to outbound email requirements such as DLP and encryption. These features are very differentiated across products.
- Organizations concerned about targeted attacks should consider this attack prevention capability as a primary differentiator among Leaders.
Market Overview
The SEG market is a mature market. The penetration rate of commercial SEG solutions is close to 100% of enterprises. Buyers are becoming more price-sensitive; 80% of recently surveyed reference customers (see Note 1) said that price was important or very important. The market growth rate has leveled off, and there are no significant entrants into the market or acquisitions — all classic symptoms of a mature market.
Despite market maturity, SEGs are not a solution companies can do without. Global spam volumes declined in 2011, as spammers moved to other mediums such as social networks, but spam still represents as much as 75% of email and email viruses. Phishing attacks continue to oscillate, while more targeted phishing attacks increase. Better protection from targeted phishing attacks is the most critical new inbound protection capability (72% of respondents indicated that this was a very important capability), but only a few vendors have advanced the state of the art against these attacks. Also, leading vendors continue to invest in anti-spam techniques to maintain high detection and low false-positive rates.
Interest in outbound email hygiene continues. Outbound capabilities such as DLP and encryption capabilities remain the single biggest feature differentiators and are the primary reason we have not yet moved to a MarketScope format for this analysis. Of the respondents (see Note 1), 32% indicated that they already use DLP, and 35% plan on adopting DLP in the next 24 months. Thirty-two percent of respondents already use email encryption beyond TLS, while another 28% plan on adopting it in the next 24 months.
Form factors are also differentiators, with interest and deployment of virtual solutions and SaaS solutions continuing. Leading vendors in this market are expanding their offerings vertically into adjacent markets (such as mailbox hosting, hosted archiving, e-discovery and continuity services) and horizontally into SWG (see "Magic Quadrant for Secure Web Gateway") solutions linked by common DLP and management. However, buyer demand for these services from their same vendor is mixed, and purchase decisions rarely coincide.
September 21, 2011
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