News

Microsoft to Buy Sybari

• By Scott Bekker
• 02/09/2005

Should the deal pass regulatory hurdles, it will be Microsoft's second purchase of a company in the anti-virus security market in two years. But unlike GeCAD Software, which Microsoft bought in June 2003, Sybari is less of a direct competitor to other anti-virus companies.

With Sybari, Microsoft gets a vendor that takes an infrastructural approach to software and relies heavily on anti-virus partners. Sybari does not maintain its own anti-virus engine. Instead, its enterprise-focused anti-virus products license and run multiple scanning engines from anti-virus partners against e-mail messages at the gateway or in the mail server. With the current product, Antigen 8.0, customers have the choice of running from one to four anti-virus engines. Two of the engines are from Computer Associates and one each come from Sophos and Norman.

"Through this acquisition, we're excited to be able to provide customers with a server-level anti-virus solution that delivers advanced file and content-filtering capabilities and the use of multiple scan engines," Mike Nash, Microsoft corporate vice president of the Security Business Unit. Microsoft's IT department has been a Sybari customer since May.

Sybari does much of its business protecting IBM Lotus Domino/Notes environments, and Microsoft's acquisition announcement played up the enterprise value of being able to support both Domino and Exchange environments over the long term.