Abaca Technology Corp., a San Jose, Calif.-based e-mail protection and messaging security company, will be one to watch this year not because they want to eradicate spam, but for their major channel launch in Canada.
Founded in 2005 by Steven T. Kirsch, the man behind the search engine Infoseek, Abaca’s initial go to market strategy was through direct sales. To date, the company now has more than 100 SMB customers, which currently represents the more than 15,000 daily users of its solutions.
Last month, Leo Jolicoeur was appointed as the new CEO of Abaca, succeeding Kirsch. Jolicoeur said starting at the end of this month the firm will be launching a North American-wide channel plan.
Bill Kasje, director of business development at Abaca, said the company’s direct model strategy was a way for the company to get its feet off the ground.
“The direct model was a way for us to kick start and get some customers,” Kasje said. “Long term, the majority of our sales will come from the distributors and resellers that we establish relationships with.”
Kasje says Abaca will actively recruit partners including VARs, SIs and solution providers in the e-mail security space in this year’s first and second quarters.
“I predict early 2009 we’ll see partners and the program really take up,” he said. “We want to make sure the [channel] program is attractive so the channel will be excited about signing up.”
While exact details surrounding the partner program were kept tightly under wrap, Jolicoeur said it will be a tiered channel program with incentives.
Jolicoeur said the company now has about four or five Canadian customers in the SME and SMB space with staff sizes under 1,000 employees. Jolicoeur notes the Canadian market in particular holds plenty of opportunities because he says no other company offers the same value proposition that Abaca does.
Abaca’s product portfolio currently includes its Email Protection Gateway (EPG), Virtual Email Protection Gateway and its ReceiverNet services. These solutions offer users a guaranteed 99 per cent filtration accuracy rate against spam. EPG is also a plug-and-play solution that can be operational within 30 minutes and requires little to no system administration, says Abaca.
Kasje says EPG is based on a sophisticated mathematical formula that analyzes a receiver’s reputation to help differentiate legitimate e-mails from spam. If a message is sent to a user who receives a lot of spam, the message is most likely to be spam. Therefore, if a message is sent to a user who receives little spam, the message is more likely to be legitimate.
“EPG is a new and radical way to approach the issue of spam and we’re confident it will change the anti-spam market place,” Jolicoeur said.