SonicWall Unveils MailFrontier Wares

This year, SonicWall plans to roll out new SonicWall Email Security appliances that pack the inbound and outbound messaging protection tools from the MailFrontier deal, said Gleb Budman, senior director of product management at SonicWall, Sunnyvale, Calif.

Software that loads SonicWall's new Email Security 5.0 messaging security software on Windows 2000 servers is available now for small- and midsize-business and enterprise environments, Budman said. The first appliances for SMBs are due out in May, with enterprise appliances following in mid-June.

In July, SonicWall plans to introduce an upgrade that adds compliance tools to better detect combinations of data contained in e-mails, such as Social Security numbers and medical terms, Budman said.

Email Security 5.0 also upgrades the appliances now in place at about 2,000 legacy MailFrontier customers and MSPs, so they won’t have to trade in their hardware, according to Budman. After acquiring remote access vendor Enkoo in November, SonicWall ran a trade-in program that gave customers a discount when they exchanged Enkoo's SSL-VPN appliance for one from SonicWall.

"Existing MailFrontier customers are on a stable upgrade path," Budman said.

Late this year, SonicWall plans to include its Global Management System (GMS) as part of the new Email Security offering, he said, adding that the remote monitoring, management and problem remediation tool set will ship inside most SonicWall products.

"It's purely a scheduling thing," Budman said of the delay in shipping GMS with its latest products.

Mark Gengenbach, president of Client Server Technologies Group (CSTG), an Omaha, Neb., solution provider, said he would have liked GMS to arrive sooner. Many of CSTG’s customers are SMBs--some as small as 10 to 15 employees--and having the GMS tools would be beneficial because e-mail security solutions are often provided to such clients as a managed service, he said.

"[GMS] would be a nice feature to have right now," Gengenbach said.

For now, Gengenbach has begun selling the server-based Email Security software, and he can perform complementary--albeit more rudimentary--remote monitoring via MSP products from LPI Level Platforms.

In acquiring MailFrontier, SonicWall picked up roughly 100 VAR partners and 2,000 customers. MailFrontier sales were about 80 percent indirect, and 30 percent to 40 percent of MailFrontier VARs were already SonicWall resellers, according to SonicWall.

SonicWall Email Security 200, 300, 400, 500 appliances are slated to ship in mid-May and support up to 50, 100, 250 and 1,000 users, respectively. Due out in mid-June are the enterprise appliances: the SonicWall Email Security 6000, which supports up to 5,000 users, and the SonicWall Email Security 8000, which supports more than 5,000 users. Pricing ranges from $1,395 plus support for the SonicWall Email Security 500 appliance to about $25,995 plus support for the SonicWall Email Security 8000.