IBM Looks to Clean Up the Inbox

IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) is offering to help you fight Internet bugs with its latest service offering.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based firm today unveiled a new managed security service designed to combat the threats posed by viruses, spam, and all the other unpleasant content that gets your network manager (and maybe even your corporate attorneys) in a sweat.

The E-mail Security Management Services employ technology from Messagelabs to scan and monitor both inbound and outbound email outside the customer network. IBM says that, in addition to anti-virus and anti-spam features, the service also offers email image filtering. This uses a technique called composition analysis to identify and stop unwanted images.

But IBM could have its work cut out in a busy market for managed security services. The move to provide managed services over network-based security platforms represents a major opportunity for telecom carriers at the moment, according to a recent Light Reading Insider (see Pipe Cleaners).

As a result, IBM finds itself up against some stiff competition, including BT Group plc (NYSE: BTY; London: BTA), AT&T Corp. (NYSE: T), MCI (Nasdaq: WCOEQ, MCWEQ), and VeriSign Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN).Even having the weight of its Gargantuan Global Services division to fall back on may not be enough to help IBM deliver the new email service, warns Laura Koetzle, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

Presumably, they are going to look for new customers with this, and the firms most likely to be interested in this are mid-market firms that find spam filtering to be too onerous,” she says.

This could pose something of a challenge for IBM. “They sell plenty of thinkpads and servers to the mid-market businesses,” says Koetzle, "but not services."

So, how does she think IBM might get around this potential problem? “The logical channel to reach this market is a lot of the telecom providers, because they do a lot of the voice and data services for these customers."

Even with the telecom providers looking for their own share of the managed services pie, this could still be possible. For one thing, IBM already has close technology links with many of the major players. Back in the late 90s, for example, IBM and AT&T signed major outsourcing agreements with each other valued at around $9 billion.— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum